Finding vitality in ’90s-era sounds
‘Clean’ Soccer Mommy Fat Possum Records
What do the members of Generation Z hear when they listen to the indie rock of the ’90s? A palate cleanser from today’s hyper-digital era? A self-effacing smirk in the face of social media’s self-aggrandizement? A time when music was made in sweaty garages and not the blue glow of a laptop?
It’s hard not to hear something potent and intergenerational in the debut album from Sophie Allison, 20, the Nashville singer-songwriter who performs as Soccer Mommy.
Her record, “Clean,” due out Friday, sits in the Liz Phair/Archers of Loaf lineage of untucked-in guitar rock. But her writing has a modern and wary eye toward love and its foibles: “Mary keeps you off her mind / She wants to spend her weekend right / Out with her friends just getting high, like a stoner girl,” she sings on “Cool,” one of the album’s standouts, and she can even find real kinship with a partner’s ex on “Last Girl.”
She’s a notably creative guitar player, too. Songs are built on weird, chiming chords or fragments of picking and echoes that make her purposefully modest arrangements feel interesting and unique every time.
All the Chapel Hill, N.C., and Portland, Ore., GenXers who worked these sounds in the Clinton era should be thrilled young female acts such as Jay Som, Mitski and now Soccer Mommy are finding new perspectives and vitality there.