From Her To Eternity
The Nashville indie rocker’s deep soul mining strikes gold. By Keith Cameron.
Soccer Mommy ★★★★ Sometimes, Forever LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP
SOPHIE ALLISON’S swift progress from teenage bedroom diarist self-releasing on Bandcamp to public-facing recording artist sharing a label with St. Vincent must have challenged this intrepid auditor of young adult confusion. The final song on her third Soccer Mommy album finds the 24-year-old addressing the downsides of laying it all out there in a world where haters gonna hate across multiple platforms. “I read the things people have to say/They make me feel like I’m not a person,” Allison notes on Still, voice sorrowfully blank, words and acoustic guitar downstrokes recalling those early DIY days’ unvarnished intimacy. We hear about “white little pills” and an act of self-harm. “I still don’t know what I was thinking/But
I did it still.”
Evoking universal connection from personal agony via sad-faced mid-paced alt-rock requires more than just chutzpah, however, and the growth of Soccer Mommy from solo outlet to successful b(r)and is testimony to Allison’s sharpness and ambition as a writer. As Unholy Affliction states, “I don’t want the money… but I want perfection.”
After two albums which conventionally layered up and teased out her simple songs’ intrinsic widescreen drama, Sometimes, Forever attains new levels of artistry, amid the eye-catching deployment of producer Daniel Lopatin – AKA visionary electronic collagist and Weeknd collaborator Oneohtrix Point Never. Everywhere, the dynamic tension meters bristle: treated guitars pierce the skin of Fire In The Driveway’s bare acoustics, and percolating synths murmur a spirit commentary upon its will-they/won’tthey break-up scene. The dislocated industrial creep of Darkness Forever has hanging guitar figures scrambling the song’s doomy meditation upon Sylvia Plath’s suicide.
Counterpointing her devotion to bloody-knuckled self-analysis, Allison possesses a disarming way with pure melody, a quality mined from such obvious touchstones as Tori Amos and Robert Smith: the ultra-hooky Shotgun oozes from a newly unearthed Cure bassline. That voice is key too, a narcotic marriage of Madder Rose’s Mary Lorson and The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler. Less expected are the occasional tortured echoes of mid-’00s Bob Mould channelling his inner Liz Phair, yielding counter-intuitively pretty opener Bones and Don’t Ask Me’s euphoric MBV-blast of self-acceptance. Feel It All The Time, meanwhile, is Peak Mom, a goldensmogged truck-driver’s cruise, Sheryl Crow fronting Slowdive on a road trip to nowhere. “And I’m just 22 going on 23/ Already worn down from everything.”
Such tireless intensity ideally requires reciprocation from the listener, which may not always be realistic or possible. As Sophie Allison admits on Still, “I don’t know how to feel things small/It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all.” Yet her insinuation of millennial angst-pop into premillennial alt-rock is so deft and affecting that Sometimes,
Forever rewards the investment. Soccer Mommy feels like the real deal.