Sidney Gish’s story so far is a familiar one. By day, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter studies music business at Boston’s Northeastern University; by night, she digs deep into lo-fi bedroom pop, anti-folk, and uptempo rock jingles, adding to the wealth of catchy, oddball songs she’s been posting on Bandcamp since 2015. The next step, as everyone from Frankie Cosmos to Car Seat Headrest can tell you, is widespread acclaim and a record deal. No Dogs Allowed, Gish’s second proper full-length, just might be the album that gets her there. Listening to this self-released gem feels like stepping into the brain of an insecure, hyper-aware, gifted young person who may or may not be totally oblivious to how endearing they are.
As a solo artist, Gish is versatile enough to serve as her own backing band. Over the album’s 13 tracks, she uses electric guitar, melodica, MIDI instruments, and assorted percussion to evoke a one-woman show full of clever melodies, inventive hooks, and borderline-jazz guitar licks. (“i’m not studying jazz guitar i just looked up a ii V I tutorial once and want to get ok at it before i die LMAO,” she says in a typically self-deprecating note on her Bandcamp page.) Her rich vocal harmonies cascade on “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and encourage sing-along moments on “Impostor Syndrome.” Gish has credited her knack for complex arrangements to her naturally having perfect pitch—“If a car beeps in an F sharp, then I’ll know it’s an F sharp,” she told The Boston Globe—but the ingenuity of her songwriting is about much more than luck. Just listen to “Not But For You, Bunny,” where she introduces contrapuntal, almost contradictory vocal parts and channels Tom Tom Club to serenade her pet rabbit. Moments like this show that she’s been honing her virtuosic skills for years, with or without an audience.
Gish’s uniquely skewed sense of humor is the album’s best hook of all. On “Good Magicians,” she twists a story of manipulation and emotional sleight-of-hand into a flirtatious ode to a trickster: “I would end up with Trix cereal’s mascot suffocated in a hat/And half a torso cut in half...” she muses. “That, the rabbit, and a non-comedic lawsuit on top of that.” Later, she mocks dull conventionality with titles like “I’m Filled With Steak, And Cannot Dance.” But most of the time, she’s just trying to point out her weaknesses before someone else does. “Two-faced bitches never lie/And therefore I never lie,” she sings on the guitar-scaling highlight “Sin Triangle,” using tongue-in-cheek phrasing to suggest something subtler than a garden-variety melodramatic sulk. On the same song, she puts her noncommittal attitude in geopolitical terms to satirize the benefits of distance (“Maybe I wanna see him/But then again, I’m an isolationist”). Elsewhere, she chides herself for mispronouncing a Greek goddess’s name as “purse-a-phone” and questions her individuality through the eyes of a city rat, nodding to solipsistic philosophy, The Matrix and video-game NPCs as she goes. It’s as if Gish is standing atop a pile of books, so overcome with nerves that she repurposes their facts into self-effacing darts. Yet the more she does this, the more she stands out as a smart, plainspoken, entirely relatable young person in the post-Tumblr era.
