Soccer Mommy’s Visceral Chronicle of Loss

The earliest iteration of Soccer Mommy emerged out of a bedroom in the summer of 2015, with a handful of lo-fi, home-recorded songs posted to Bandcamp. The songs were sparse and built around acoustic guitar, with a vividly confessional lyricism. Sophie Allison, the artist behind the moniker, was born in Zurich, Switzerland, but moved to Nashville as a toddler. She began playing guitar when she was a child, attended a high school for the performing arts, and started releasing the aforementioned home recordings. She left her home town to attend college, at N.Y.U., a venture that didn’t last long. After playing some shows, in 2017, Allison signed with Fat Possum records and dropped out of school, to begin a recording career in earnest. Her latest project, “Evergreen,” is Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, following three critically acclaimed releases that have traversed a wide range of sonic style and production techniques. On her past two albums, “Color Theory,” from 2020, and “Sometimes Forever,” from 2022, Allison has shown an interest in increasing her volume and layering sounds to push her compositions into new territory. For “Sometimes Forever,” she worked with Daniel Lopatin, the electronic-music producer and arranger better known by his stage name, Oneohtrix Point Never. Their collaboration led to some beautifully harrowing songs that delved into shoegaze and experimental noise, among them, “Darkness Forever,” which teems with quiet spaces filled at intervals by weighty bass lines and heavy drags of electric guitar. “Evergreen,” for Allison, is something of a return to form. Though it sounds cleaner and richer than her early bedroom recordings, and not without moments of high-volume intensity, the album is largely anchored by acoustic guitar. As on all of Soccer Mommy’s records, the other anchoring point is Allison’s songwriting, which is more granular and interior than traditional confessional fare. Her excavations of the self often come in tones of surprise: surprise at having made it this far, surprise at the velocity of her feelings, surprise that there is still more to be felt after all this time. Where some confessional writing might come steeped in certainty, its […]

Click here to view original page at Soccer Mommy’s Visceral Chronicle of Loss

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.