3 out of 5

Label: Saddle Creek

Produced by: feeble little horse (?)

Layers and layers and layers of fuzz and an affectation for the sweetest era of distorted guitar pop – the alterna-grunge of the 90s, and specifically the bestest time when groups like The Breeders were something of a household name – lower-cased feeble little horse channel all that disaffection and cynicism into something equally twee; bubblegum tunes as run through a Pavement blender. It’s arresting as hell and never not hitting toe-tappy / head-bobby notes, with Lydia Slocum’s off-key speak sing delivering a cross-section of fascinating and off-putting lyrics that squiggle the most fascinating imagery through relationship and self-empowerment themes.

And when all of this noise – layers and layers off vocals; the reverbed to hell-and-back mush of guitar – tips into the chaotic, with the crew giggling or chattering in the background as the song otherwise tries to kick off (Chores, Drama Queen), it creates the most glorious haze of passion and weird hooks, drawing a deliriously wandering line from that grunge era to modern day digital compositions.

Unfortunately, if much of this is sounding indulgent, well… yes. The majority of hayday feels fussy for its own sake, the group knowing to prioritize a hook and a sing-song vibe and then figuring that they’ve committed to this noisy shtick, so run the song through the blender a few hundred times. For something so seemingly chaotic, this creates a sameness to many of the tracks; again, never not catchy, and the lyric sheet is always worth reading, but the surface level read is one of style over substance. The catch is, the substance was already great! …Making it pretty overbaked, such that you wish they’d just kept the core of the songs intact, and left all the freakout fuzz for select moments to give it impact. The fact that those select moments still have impact on the disc, with all the “extra” going on around it, seems pretty telling.

The Saddle Creek rerelease includes some extra tracks that don’t add or detract from the overall effect, or rather balance each other out: Dog Song 2 is kind of the stripped down vibe I’m asking for, if perhaps too directly channeling 90s grunge in the process; a remix of Termites flirts with obnoxiousness – where Dog Song goes for less, the remix goes for more, and not every genre needs a remix, y’all…