feeble little horse
Eve Alpert / via publicist
The opening topline on “Shopping” makes me think of a retail theft alarm, as if we’ve just caught feeble little horse with their hands full of pilfered Dior lipsticks. But as tactile as Sebastian Kinsler’s guitar riffs and Jake Kelley’s plosive kickdrums might feel, Lydia Slocum’s verses on “Shopping” are all URL.
“She’s in my feed I need her clothes I need her hair,” she murmurs over a bed of grungy power chords. “I wanna steal her phone and go on her SSENSE.” You can practically feel the glassy surface of a smartphone beneath your fingertips as Slocum fretfully croons about her perceived inadequacies, watching her own Instagram story back like a TV show to try and imagine how she looks to an outside observer – very relatable!
Across bitknot, commodity fetishism becomes somewhat of a coping mechanism for feeble little horse, but they’re no mindless shopaholics. On “Dior,” a tube of lipstick in Slocum’s pocket becomes almost talismanic, warding off insecurities and unwanted encounters alike; “Poison” finds the trio contemplating the possibility of being “forever and ever in debt.” So “Shopping” isn’t really about the digital thrill of click-to-purchase and pay-in-four, but the tiny barbs left in the ego by comparing ourselves to others. “Would you fuck with these shoes? I wanna look just like you,” Slocum muses on the chorus. Sometimes all we want is to be anyone else.
