Pitchfork评测Feeble Little Horse新专Girls With Fish

The Pittsburgh noise-pop experimentalists come into their own on a short yet richly textured album full of fuzzy melodic hooks and beguiling left turns.

匹兹堡的噪音流行实验家在一张简短但厚实感的专辑中得到自己想要的效果，专辑中充满了模糊的旋律人声和令人满意的转变。

Half a decade or so ago, the electric guitar received a wellness check. As sales plummeted and legacy manufacturers slogged through financial straits, concerned parties blamed the popularity of pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, genres more often built from synthesizers and drum machines. Even Paul McCartney chimed in, telling The Washington Post in 2017 that young people lacked “guitar heroes.”

大约在五年前，电吉他接受了健康检查。随着销量暴跌，传统制造商陷入财务困境，有关部门将其归咎于流行、嘻哈和电子音乐的流行，这些流派通常由合成器和鼓机组成。甚至保罗·麦卡特尼也在2017年告诉《华盛顿邮报》说，年轻人缺少一位“吉他英雄”。

Safe to say that the four members of Feeble Little Horse, most of whom were still in high school at that point, were not tuned into this conversation. The Pittsburgh noise-pop band’s second record, Girl With Fish, speaks to the idea that a younger generation of musicians would recognize the confluence of guitar music and digital sounds as a doorway rather than a death knell. It’s a familiar story, but Feeble Little Horse’s wall of influences—textured shoegaze guitars, exacting pop hooks, idiosyncratic production flourishes—has been wheat-pasted with such vim that it feels fresh and, just as importantly, emotionally resonant.

可以肯定地说，Feeble Little Horse的四名成员当时大部分还在上高中，没有收听这个对话。匹兹堡噪音流行乐队的第二张唱片《Girl With Fish》表达了这样一种想法，即年轻一代的音乐家会将吉他音乐和数字声音的融合视为门道，而不是丧钟。这是一个熟悉的故事，但Feeble Little Horse的影响之墙——纹理的shoegaze吉他，严格的流行人声，独特的制作蓬勃发展——已经用如此鲜艳的活力浇上了小麦，感觉很新鲜，同样重要的是，在情感上产生了共鸣。

Feeble Little Horse began as a collaboration between guitarists Ryan Walchonski and Sebastian Kinsler while both were students at the University of Pittsburgh. Jake Kelley joined on drums for 2021’s Modern Tourism EP and Lydia Slocum rounded out the band later that year, signing on as a bassist and lyricist during the hasty recording sessions for the band’s full-length debut, Hayday. Built around sticky melodies and samples both homemade and borrowed—though many of these have since been removed for copyright reasons—the record gleefully jumped from idea to idea.

Feeble Little Horse最初是吉他手Ryan Walchonski和Sebastian Kinsler之间的合作，当时他们都是匹兹堡大学的学生。Jake Kelley加入了2021年现代旅游EP的鼓手，Lydia Slocum在当年晚些时候完成了乐队，在乐队全长处女作Hayday的仓促录音中作为贝斯手和作词人签约。围绕着自制和借来的粘稠的旋律和样本构建——尽管其中许多已经因版权原因被删除——这些唱片兴高采烈地从一个想法跳到另一个想法。

Hayday’s nimble shapeshifting was prompted in part by a shrinking window of opportunity: With graduation day looming for some of its members, the band imagined there wouldn’t be another chance. But instead of becoming a brief blip in the annals of equine rock, Feeble Little Horse acquired word-of-mouth buzz that encouraged them to stick together. (A deal with Saddle Creek, home to experimentally ambitious contemporaries like Palm and Spirit of the Beehive, couldn’t have hurt either.) Girl With Fish solidifies the notion that Feeble Little Horse’s creative alchemy, born in college dorm rooms and nurtured at DIY basement shows, is a force deserving of further exploration. Remotely self-recorded and produced across various Pittsburgh apartments, its 11 songs are oddball bursts of imagination, whimsy, and discord.

Hayday灵活的变形部分是由一个缩小的机会窗口引起的：随着一些成员的毕业日迫在眉睫，乐队想象着不会再有另一个机会了。但是，Feble Little Horse没有成为马摇滚编年史中的短暂亮点，而是获得了口碑嗡嗡声，鼓励他们团结在一起。（与Saddle Creek的交易，Saddle Creek是Palm和Spirit of the Beehive等实验性雄心勃勃的同代人的家园，也不会有什么坏处。）《Girl With Fish》巩固了这样一种观念，即Feeble Little Horse的创造性炼金术，出生在大学宿舍里，在DIY地下室表演中培养，是一股值得进一步探索的力量。在匹兹堡的各个公寓里远程自我录制和制作，它的11首歌曲充满了想象力、异想天开和不和谐音。

The early minutes of Girl With Fish work overtime to establish the band’s flair for fuzzy pop hooks. The spiky adrenaline of “Tin Man” is especially satisfying, a poetic takedown of emotionally impaired manipulators driven by Kelley’s metallic percussion and a freaky little riff. “I gotta go ’cause you flash sadness,” Slocum sings, a guttural “huh” punctuating the breath between verses. “I found you all rusted and leaky/Took him apart and I found nobody.” The tight opening gallop spotlights the lyrics, abstract fragments from which the band launches equally beguiling arrangements. One of her most delicious lines arrives early on “Freak,” a fuzzy appeal to a crush’s physique: “How can you be satisfied/She’s 5'1" and you’re 6'5".”

Girl With Fish的最初几分钟赶进度，以建立乐队对模糊流行人声的天赋。《Tin Man》中尖锐的肾上腺素特别令人满意，这是由Kelley的金属打击乐和怪异的小即兴表演驱动的情感受损操纵者的诗意击倒。“我得走了，因为你闪现出悲伤，”Slocum唱道，嗓音低吟着“嗯”，在诗句之间打断呼吸。“我发现你们都生锈了，漏水了/把他分开了，我一个人也没找到。”紧凑的开场飞奔聚焦了歌词，抽象片段，乐队从中发起了同样吸引人的编排。她最美味的台词之一很早就出现在《Freak》中，这是对暗恋对象体格的模糊吸引力：“你怎么能满意/她身高5英尺1英寸，而你身高6英尺5英寸。”

While Slocum’s lyrical contributions to Hayday arrived at the eleventh hour, on Girl With Fish she now writes with greater confidence, pondering depression, lust, and most strikingly, religion. “Wet bed sheets she bled from the pressure/Plastic Catholic priest watched from the dresser,” goes one haunting verse of “Steamroller.” There’s a grungy charm to her scenes, complemented by the deadpan sweetness of her singing voice. The contrast works particularly well on “Station,” an eloquent, if simplistic, snapshot of loneliness that unfolds atop delicate harmonies and a sound that begins as if cranked out of a haunted music box and expands into a lush revelation. Similarly intriguing is “Sweet,” which opens with a roundhouse kick of blown-out guitars and crashing drums before recoiling into a tightly interlocking riff. Alternating lines, Kinsler and Slocum sketch out a scene that walks the line between innocent and ominous: “I’m only down the street/Can’t keep him out of me/Inviting me to leave/See it in everything.”

虽然Slocum对Hayday的抒情贡献是在最后一刻，但在《Girl With Fish》中，她现在更自信地写歌，思考着抑郁、欲望和最引人注目的信仰。“湿床单，她因压力而流血/不自然的天主教牧师从梳妆台上看着，”《蒸汽压路机》中一首令人难以忘怀的诗句。她的场景有一种邋遊的魅力，并辅之以她歌声中死板的甜美。这种对比在《Station》中特别有效，这是一个雄辩但简单却的孤独的快照，在微妙的和声和声上展开，声音就像从闹鬼的音乐盒中摇出来一样，并扩展成一个迷人的发现。同样耐人寻味的是“Sweet”，它以爆裂的吉他和撞击鼓的圆形踢开序幕，然后反弹成紧密相连的即兴重复段。Kinsler和Slocum交替勾勒出了一个在无辜和不祥之间分界线的场景：“我只是在街上/不能让他远离我/邀请我离开/在一切事物中都看到了。”

At just under a half-hour, Girl With Fish goes for the sprint without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed. Part of this balance is due to Kinsler’s deft digital finagling, which ties together the band’s more eccentric impulses with their melodic foundations. One highlight is “Heaven,” which begins as a downcast lullaby before mutating into avant-alien, as if the band were slurped up mid-song by a psychedelic toad. “Paces” takes the opposite approach, opening with jagged pitched-and-chopped guitars that gradually loosen into dreamy bliss with shades of Duster. Kinsler has cited “overproduced indie rock” artists like Sorry and Spirit of the Beehive as influences, but his style is equally indebted to pie-in-the-sky producers like Pi’erre Bourne, whose tag was sampled in the original version of Hayday’s “Termites.”

在不到半小时的时间里，Girl With Fish开始爆发，从未感到匆忙或装填过度。这种平衡的一部分是由于Kinsler灵巧的数字金融，它将乐队更古怪的冲动与他们的旋律基础联系在一起。一个亮点是《Heaven》，它以一首沮丧的摇篮曲开始，然后变异为前卫，就好像乐队在歌曲中途被一只迷幻的蟾蜍吞虎咽了。“Paces”采取了相反的方法，以锯齿状的音调和切碎的吉他开场，随着Duster的色调逐渐放松到梦幻般的幸福。Kinsler将Sorry和Spirit of the Beehive等“过度制作的独立摇滚”艺术家列为影响，但他的风格同样归于Pi'erre Bourne等pie-in-the-sky制作人，他们的标签在Hayday的“Termites”的原始版本中被采样。

But whatever wizardry is happening with the electronics is secondary to the collective intuition that guides Feeble Little Horse’s most mischievous instincts. Girl With Fish hits its apex on “Pocket,” a dynamic late-album highlight that recalls the freewheeling jangle of Swirlies. “All my kisses and hugs/Are burning a hole/In my pocket,” Slocum sings with a brittle sweetness. “Do I make you cringe?” But just as the twee insinuations suggested by the band’s name—that of a dopey, knock-kneed pony—appear to come to fruition, “Pocket” slips into delicate psychedelia and warped tape experimentation. Midway through, around where Slocum sings about using her “imagination to sin” and being metaphorically fucked by “a dead man,” “Pocket” does a 180. Suddenly, Slocum is screaming, the band pulls the pin out of the grenade, and just like that it’s gone: one of many magic tricks on an album that leaves you mesmerized and wanting more.

但无论电子产品发生什么魔力，都仅次于指导Feeble Little Horse最淘气的本能的共同的直觉。Girl With Fish在《Pocket》中达到了顶峰，这是一个动态的后期专辑亮点，让人想起Swirlies的自由摇摆。“我所有的亲吻和拥抱/都在燃烧一个洞/在我的口袋里，”Slocum以脆弱的甜美唱道。“我让你畏缩吗？”但是，正如乐队的名字所暗示的推文暗示——一匹愚蠢的、被敲打的小马——似乎取得了成果一样，“口袋”滑入了精致的迷幻和扭曲的磁带实验。中途，在Slocum唱着利用她的“想象犯罪”并被“死人”隐喻性地做ai的地方，“Pocket”做到了180分。突然，Slocum在尖叫，乐队从手榴弹中拔出大头针，就像它一样消失了：专辑中的许多魔术之一，让你着迷并想要更多。