Concert Review: feeble little horse at Mohawk
On tour behind bitknot, the scrappy third album for the Pittsburgh trio, feeble little horse brought a night of glitch-pop chaos to Austin's Mohawk on July 21, dispensing overdriven bass, hat merch mania, and a setlist that proved the band's noisiest impulses have only sharpened with time.
Written by Noah Keany
Photos courtesy of Carry the Zero
Five years removed from their debut, Hayday, and two since 2023's Girl with Fish, feeble little horse has spent the summer galloping across North America behind bitknot, an 11-track record written, arranged, and recorded by Sebastian Kinsler, Lydia Slocum and Jake Kelley in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The album wrestles with the tension between human connection and the isolating pull of modern consumer culture. Like the album’s tumultuous themes, their performance arrived with the band's melodies sweet enough to hum, buried under walls of distortion loud enough to rattle your whole body. Mohawk's outdoor stage, with its stacked levels of space in the venue for audience members to stand and open Texas sky, gave that distortion plenty of room to travel.
With no introduction at all, Los Angeles electro-industrial pop trio Touching Ice opened the night at 8 p.m. sharp with smoke and strobe lights. The trio, led by vocalist Abigail Reese alongside Davis Stewart and Dominic Colangelo, tore through the overwhelming bass and muted vocals of its opener before sliding into "Heart Like A Dog" with a low end so dominant that even the guitar struggled to cut through. “Let's Kill Ourselves," hit at 8:27 p.m. with a hardness that shook the venue's fences from the top level down. "We're Touching Ice and we got two more songs for you," Reese said. "After that, feeble little horse." The crowd roared. The final two songs leaned further into the night's dreamy, glitch-laced shoegaze, and Touching Ice closed out at 8:41 p.m. to another wave of applause.
Blue and red light swept the stage as feeble little horse set up at 9:02 p.m., and 9 minutes later, the band launched into "Freak" at 9:11 p.m. Instanteously, heads bobbed across the crowd, and the audience sang along in full to the song's line of “How can you be satisfied? She’s five-foot-one and you’re six-foot-five.” "Shady," a track that floated across the venue with its bedroom pop lyrics and soft woodwinds, followed and after which Slocum greeted the crowd for the first time. "Hey guys, we're feeble little horse!" she said. "So happy to be in Austin!"
"Paces" arrived at 9:15 p.m. with its low, shoegazy vocals draped over groovy guitar and bedroom-pop instrumentation, ending three minutes later thanks to Slocum, who called the venue "really awesome." As the performance transitioned from tracks that gently swept the audience into swaying back and forth, "Sweet" sent the crowd into its first true surge of the night, with the lowest section of the pit jumping along to a high-energy bridge and chorus before the track closed. "Chores" kept that momentum alive, the crowd roaring along to every lyric as Slocum let out a sharp "Fuck it!" mid-song.
"Picture" slowed the room to a sway, its vocals and instrumentation dropping into a sad, mellow register that closed to a rogue "Yeehaw" from an audience member. Slocum addressed the Texas heat directly afterward. "I don't know how y'all feel about this heat," she said. "I don't know how you're having fun." Kinsler responded more bluntly with, "I'm gonna be honest, I would never go to this show.” "Are y'all used to this heat?" When the crowd yelled back that they were, he laughed them off and called them liars.
"Doorway" snapped the energy back up instantly and ran three minutes before Slocum mentioned the band was on its longest tour to date, prompting cheers and a shy aside about someone in the crowd snapping a photo. "That's why I never look at the pictures," she said. "Poison," a noticeably softer, soft-rock leaning cut, followed and closed at 9:33 p.m., after which Slocum thanked Austin specifically for a first: fans wearing the band's new merch hats. "Call" ran boldly into microphone-peaking territory before the band paused briefly to towel off sweat and reset.
With its catchy hooks,"Rewind" opened to woos and jumping bodies. The drummer tapped out a beat on the snare between songs before "Tin Man" began at 9:39 p.m. under a blue light, its shoegaze chorus prompted a room-wide head throw. "Cradle" followed immediately at 9:42 p.m. under pink lights sweeping the crowd, holding the crowd in a trance with its hypnotic chorus and instrumentals that fittingly resembled a lullaby into another round of thanks from Slocum. When the crowd clamored for 10 more songs, Kinsler turned to Slocum with a grin. "Should we do 10 more songs?" he asked.
"Dior" arrived next at 9:46 p.m., its instrumental build drawing the whole crowd into a clapping frenzy through the high-tempo chorus before ending three minutes later. "Steamroller" followed immediately, a brief, propulsive cut that kept the crowd's hands in the air. Slocum and Kinsler then delivered the night's most dramatic setup in tandem. "This is our last song," they told the crowd. "We have played it the last nine times, and we have to play it, or something will happen to someone very bad." "DMT," the final song of the main set, began at 9:50 p.m. with the crowd filling in the lyrics during a stripped-down pause before the guitarist tore through a minute-long solo to close the set at 9:53 p.m.
The crowd's cheers brought the band back out at 9:55 p.m., Slocum redoing her makeup as she returned to the mic. The encore, "Dog Song 2," began at 9:56 p.m. to an immediate sway from the crowd that erupted into full headbanging once the guitar exploded. The audience sang along to the song's "I get sick with every touch" line as the guitars surged one final time, closing the night at 9:58 p.m. as the band left the stage to a crowd that had spent nearly an hour proving it could match feeble little horse's chaos beat for beat, heat and all.