Lexi Goddard and Chris Coleslaw first met while working at the same café in Chicago, soon uniting to perform Neil Young covers and, in time, writing their own songs as Tobacco City. Debut EP “LSD” arrived in 2018, followed by 2021’s full-length Tobacco City, USA, an album that suggested their spiritual locus lay at some movable point between ’60s Bakersfield and the bleached expanse of the American Southwest. Echoes of Gram and Emmylou shaped their harmonies, while a supporting cast conjured up the kind of glazed psychedelic country so beloved of early Flying Burritos.
i)Horses(i) is even more impressive. Smart, evocative and almost casually assured, it’s the sound of a band pooling their influences into something timeless, their unhurried songs as vivid as their lyrical depictions of carefree youth, weightless days and bitter experience. “Autumn” is a wry portrait of teenage life in smalltown America, where a dirty lakeshore breeze comes in from the water treatment plant, diner grease fills the air and there’s always someone running from the police. It’s rich and poetic, reminiscent of The Handsome Family in its sense of quotidian drama. The gorgeous “Time” carries something of My Morning Jacket’s effortless drift, countrified by fiddle and Andy ‘Red’ PK’s radiant pedal steel. “Watching berries ripen on the vine/Gonna take my time,” sing Coleslaw and Goddard, as if willing this reverie to last forever. A similar form of ambience steers “Horses”, essentially an interlude in three parts, like fragments from a fast-fading dream.
Goddard takes the lead on slow-rolling ballad “Fruit From The Vine”, her voice as softly expressive as Judee Sill, thoughts of regret tainting what appears to be an idyllic scene: “And the women all singin’ while the sun disappears/And the roosters wrestle over the last warm beer.” By contrast, she and Coleslaw get to frolic freely on the up-tempo “Buffalo”, as flames burn across the plains. It’s a wonderful rush of good-time choogle and barroom honky-tonk, driven by voices that feel like they’re here to stay.
