Playful, alluring noise music

Pittsburgh-based indie rock band Feeble Little Horse makes music for a road trip, or maybe an acid trip. Either way, their newest album Girl With Fish is a 25-minute wild ride of distortion and delicacy. While noise music often sacrifices beauty in favor of experimentation, Girl With Fish hits a perfect balance between the two, full of fuzzy guitar and electronic scramble while never feeling unapproachable. 

The magic of Girl With Fish lies in Lydia Slocum, bassist and lead singer for Feeble Little Horse. Take the album’s opener “Freak”, a track that borders on hyperpop in its repetitive structure and liberal use of distortion. Staticky guitar high in the mix may send some listeners cringing away, but Slocum’s vocals are sure to pull them back in. Low yet feminine, you can hear the smirk in Slocum’s voice as she sings with vocals rising over the music’s clamor with a cool nonchalance. Her words are delicately pronounced, giving listeners the feeling that she’s not just singing, but addressing them directly.

The lyrics on Girl With Fish are often abstract and eerie, painting fragmented pictures of a high school from Hell, full of punching concrete sidewalks and dreaming of escape. Slocum’s unaffectedness, however, pulls listeners above the lyrical content, giving a tongue-in-cheek look at the themes of desperation and isolation so common to indie rock. In the album’s more noisy songs, the vocals often serve as a melody instrument, pulling catchy hooks and pretty runs out of an instrumental backing that could otherwise be difficult to follow. Girl With Fish is short and punchy, wrenching the audience from one two-minute song to the next, but Slocum extends her hand and listeners take it happily. 

Musically, Girl Wish Fish maintains its cool refusal to be pinned down, playing with elements of various genres and styles. The music has all the fun of hyperpop with songs like “Paces”, “Sweet” and “Slide” filled with complex riffs picked out on instruments edited so heavily that they’re impossible to name. The band’s ability to balance the twee with the eerie often reminds of indie artists like Alex G, with soft vocals sampled into an uneasy muddle at the end of “Heaven” and a skitter of electronic flair spiking in the background of the garage rock-influenced “Slide.”

The album’s more experimental tracks were often the standouts, with the layered spoken-word section in “Pocket” feeling equal parts silly and alluringly complex, and the soft rattle of cowbell under the pounding distortion of “Tin Man” dissolving into a picked-out groove that’s all the better for its inability to be confined to a genre. Even the slower songs – like “Station”, which starts off with indie folk acoustics – spiral back and forth from electronica, the abstracted scenes of blue collar life in “Heavy Water” beginning over strummed guitar and ending over many-layered indie rock, full of moody key changes and set to fuzzy, edited drum beats. The listening experience is at times chaotic, but listeners are best off relenting to be pulled from genre to genre, unconcerned with where the music is headed, just happy that Feeble Little Horse has agreed to take them along for the ride.

Beautiful, playful and uncanny, Girl With Fish is an indie rock album imagined in a dream, a must-listen for fans of noise music and a good way to branch out into the genre for those who might not be quite as comfortable with it. Smile on their lips, Feeble Little Horse asks listeners “do you want to be in my pocket?”, knowing that the answer is a resounding yes.