Nick Bollinger discusses the bloody, gutsy songs of 20-year-old Sophie Allison - otherwise known as Soccer Mommy.
Soccer Mommy Photo: © Ebru Yildiz 2017
There seems to be an extraordinary number of excellent young female singer-songwriters making great new records at the moment - or maybe there was always this many and the industry just overlooked them. Whatever it is, it has reached critical mass with albums like this one.
Clean Photo: supplied
Sophie Allison is a 20-year-old singer-songwriter, based in Nashville, who records under the name Soccer Mommy. Her first self-released material began to attract attention on Bandcamp three years ago and she’s now made her second album for the former blues label Fat Possum. Her songs are based around her electric guitar, which jangles satisfyingly with her interesting voicings. She has good tunes and pop hooks, and at the core of it all are her often-startling lyrics.
‘You said you loved me like an animal/stayed beside me just long enough to keep your belly full’ she sings in the the opening song, and extends that animal metaphor right through the verses in images that are visual and visceral. ‘Left me drowning/once you picked me out of your bloody teeth’.
In fact, animals and body parts feature prominently in these songs.
The violence and anger of ‘Your Dog’ extends to the video, in which you see Allison smearing herself with blood and dragging around a male corpse, which she occasionally sings to. The song looks back on an abusive relationship. It’s not pretty, and nor is a lot of her writing. But even when the subject is romantic, Allison’s imagery is primal and physical.
“I’m clawing at your skin’ – she sings in ‘Skin’ – “trying to see your bones”. After the early home-recorded Bandcamp releases and the earlier Fat Possum collection, which essentially reworked the best of those demos, this album could be seen as Soccer Mommy’s real debut.
With its suggestions of new beginnings and fresh possibilities, the title Clean is not inappropriate. But it also has a trace of irony. Allison’s songs aren’t that clean. In fact they are dripping with blood, sweat, saliva and probably other bodily fluids as well.
Allison has cited the likes of Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne as influences. She likes guitars and wants to deliver pop hooks, she says. But to me her sound harks back to Liz Phair, whose Exile In Guyville could almost be seen as the blueprint for the style.
At other times I’m taken back even further, to those belatedly celebrated records of Alex Chilton’s Big Star. With its chiming chords and air of teenage longing, a song like ‘Cool’ would have seemed quite at home on Big Star’s classic self-titled debut.
We might be getting more used to hearing records as good as this coming from Sophie Allison’s demographic. Still, Soccer Mommy’s Clean is a gutsy album by any measure; one that steers a course of its own between power pop and something much more raw and personal. Music where the skin, the blood and the bones are exposed for us all to see.
Clean is available on Fat Possum
