It’s been less than two years since Sophie Allison started making songs as Soccer Mommy, but in that short period of time everything she’s put out has been consistently rewarding and uniformly excellent. It’s hard to write the kind of music that she does with such skill — her songs are unassuming and simple on the surface, but deceptively complex. Allison’s voice is muted and empathetic, living within the songs rather than overpowering them, and her guitar work is subtle but intoxicating. Everything she writes has the same gauzy sheen, and they could scan as boring if they weren’t held down by Allison’s arresting personal narratives and enough intricate sonic framework to support many repeated listens.
She arrived pretty fully-realized, with a series of EPs with charmingly plain-spoken titles like “Songs From The Recently Sad” and “Songs From My Bedroom”. They felt intimate and universal, like she was expressing a communal grief over adolescent lost loves, told from the perspective of someone who only has nostalgia for the recent past. Allison was 18 when she recorded those songs ,putting them online as she made the transition from growing up in Nashville to moving to New York City for school but they felt like they were written by someone far more worn-out by life, or rather they encapsulated the youthful sort of jadedness
Earlier this year, she put out vinyl 7″with two excellent tracks, “Last Girl” and “Be Seeing You.” It was her first release that featured the full band she had put together to play her shows, and it became clear that Soccer Mommy songs could be much more muscular and peppy than they initially appeared.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3yOZCm-gbM
Her new video for “Inside Out,” a song that originally appeared on For Young Hearts, shows Allison at the crossroads between her full band (presented here in monster masks) and the project’s solo beginnings.
Taken from the upcoming album ‘Collection’, Out August 4th on Fat Possum Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 