Comprising of reworked versions of some of her best Bandcamp releases, as well as a few new songs written, mixed and produced by Sophie herself, “Collection” is the perfect introduction to Soccer Mommy’s sound: quietly catchy, surprisingly confrontational, the kind of music that sneaks up on you and makes a permanent first impression. There are two brand-new tracks included on Soccer Mommy’s upcoming “Collection”, whose main intention is to re-record some of Sophie Allison’s older cuts with a full band behind her. The first of those new songs, “Out Worn” demonstrated how powerful that can be, but the second, “Allison,” is a plea for self-possession and vulnerability: “Allison, put down your sword,” she addresses herself. “Give up what you’re fighting for ’cause he’s been waiting at the shore/ His feet are in the water, he’s waiting for an answer of your boat in the water/ But you’re not on the sea.” It’s a reminder to not keep your emotions bottled up when you have a fantasy, share it; when you want to tell someone you love them, do it. “Allison” takes that waiting period between when you have a thought and when you finally verbalize it and makes it sound as beautifully sad and wanting and unsure as it actually feels
Soccer Mommy – “Allison”
Taken from the upcoming mini-album, Collection, out August 4th on Fat Possum Records
all songs by Sophie Allison
guitar and vocals by Sophie Allison
recorded and engineered by Jacob Corenflos
drums and backing vocals by Thomas Borrelli
lead guitar by Kelton Young
bass by Jacob Corenflos
synth on “Out Worn” by Casey Weissbuch
This is among the best and most vital sounding post-punk albums that I’ve heard this year, Themes: no-nonsense, something to say, business suits and beanies, mental states, working class. You could be convinced that Brooklyn band B Boys are really Parquet Courts in disguise. but I’m also a sucker for this kind of Devo meets Wire meets Tubway Army stuff and Dada rocks it like it’s 1979.Essential listening for Parquet Courts fans, Abstraction takes a triangular form: vibrant guitar melodies, undulating bass lines, deep swirling grooves. Sounds that transcend a linear timeline, splintering out across multiple spectrums. Interlocking vocals skillfully bob and weave overtop, their mantras resounding.
Beware, this track is extremely catchy. These Long Island boys are talented enough to bring the wave of pop punk back in vogue. Their latest project mashed up other artist’s songs for something that is fun, refreshing, and just as hip gyrating at the originals. The album Other People’s Greatest Hits is a unique idea that surprisingly works. Their video for this mix is well done and reminds us of another group’s backwards-video creations. Check it out and keep an ear out for their style of exuberant rock.
Patent Pending present: “Wasted/Wake Me Up” from the new album “Other People’s Greatest Hits”
A mashup of Tiësto’s “Wasted” and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up”
Available now on Rude Records
The debut LP from Boston indie rock band Palehound is inspired by leader Ellen Kempner’s breakup. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow. Her songs are full of odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare.
On 2013’s Bent Nail EP, Palehound’s Ellen Kempner sang about taking a carrot for a pet in order to stave off late-teen loneliness. She makes similarly childlike gestures on her debut album. “You made beauty a monster to me, so I’m kissing all the ugly things I see,” she seethes at an ex in a so there voice on Dry Food’s title track. It’s the most deliciously futile form of revenge and reclamation: doing the opposite.
Dry Food is partially a product of the 21-year-old Boston-dwelling songwriter’s first big breakup—the deeper kind of solitude of having known and lost someone. Its sound captures the Herculean efforts required to survive the ensuing slump: “All I need’s a little sleep and I’ll be good to clean and eat,” she sings in a medicated sigh on “Easy”, her acoustic guitar rising and dipping with the methodical pace of someone trying to make a new routine stick. But like her former camp counselor and roomate Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow: she kicks the end of the song into shape with a zippy electric guitar motif and some awkward, itchy squall.
It’s followed by “Cinnamon”, which takes the opposite tack, hooked around the kind of amiable, waterlogged psych burble that Mac DeMarco noodles in his sleep. Kempner sings dreamily about her worst self-defeating impulses, but is stirred from her reverie by a divine revelation that her life is becoming “a pretty lie”. Frantic drums force the song somewhere agitated and ascendant, but instead of bursting into some bright new phrase, the furor falls away like a captivating slo-mo bellyflop.
Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. And like her old roommate, she often obscures her intentions between appealingly twisty language. “Mouth ajar watching cuties hit the half pipe/ I only feel half ripe/ Around healthier folk,” she sings on “Healthier Folk”. She distils her disgust at her own post-breakup malaise with perfectly understated images: “The hair that’s in my shower drain/ Has been clogging up my home,” she sings on “Dixie”. “And I try to scoop it up, but I wretch until I’m stuck.” It’s maybe the most straightforward song here, just fingerpicked acoustic guitar, but she messes at it like a cat dragging a mouse into a dark nook.
Saddest of all is closer “Seakonk”, where Kempner protests that she’s not alone, actually; she’s home watching TV with her parents, sister and their dogs. There’s a blithe fairground pirate ship sway to the song, which she closes with a jaunty “doo doo doo” that could have come from the credits of one of the cartoons she’s watching—only she lets the final note deflate with a groan. It’s at this point that Dry Food confronts the point it’s been evading: kidding yourself is no way to recover, and comfort offers little impetus to move on. Palehound’s discomfiting, unflinching debut suggests she knew it all along.
The sophomore album from Boston trio Palehound, A Place I’ll Always Go, is a frank look at love and loss, cushioned by indelible hooks and gently propulsive, fuzzed-out rock.
Ellen Kempner, Palehound’s vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter explains, “A lot of it is about loss and learning how to let yourself evolve past the pain and the weird guilt that comes along with grief.”
Kempner’s writing comes from upheavals she experienced in 2015 and 2016 that reframed her worldview. “I lost two people I was really close with,” she recalls. “I lost my friend Lily. I lost my grandmother too, but you expect that at 22. When you lose a friend—a young friend—nothing can prepare you for that. A lot of the record is about going on with your life, while knowing that person is missing what’s happening—they loved music and they’re missing these great records that come out, and they’re missing these shows that they would’ve wanted to go to. It just threw me for a loop to know that life is so fragile.”
Palehound’s first release for Polyvinyl is also about the light that gradually dawns after tragedy, with songs like the bass-heavy “Room” and the gentle dreamy album closer “At Night I’m Alright With You” feeling their way through blossoming love. “The album is also about learning how to find love, honestly, after loss,” says Kempner.
Since forming in 2014, Palehound Kempner, drummer Jesse Weiss (Spook The Herd), and new bassist LarzBrogan (a veteran of Boston DIY who, Kempner posits, “had 13 local bands last year”)—have taken their plainspoken, technique-heavy indie rock from the basements of Boston to festivals around the world. A Place I’llAlways Go was recorded in late 2016 at the Brooklyn complex Thump Studios with the assistance of Gabe Wax, who recorded Dry Food. “I would put my life in his hands,” Kempner asserts. “I trust him so much.”
Palehound in this episode of the Pickathon Slab Series.
A Place I’ll Always Go builds on the promise of Palehound’s critically acclaimed 2015 album Dry Food with songs that are slightly more reserved, but no less powerful. “Flowing Over” rides a sweetly hooky guitar line, with Kempner using the fuzzed-out upper register of her voice as a sort of anxious counterpoint to the riff’s infectious melody. “That song is about anxiety,” says Kempner, “and when you’re sad and you listen to sad music to feed it and feel yourself spinning all these ‘what if’s and ‘I’m terrible’s in your head.”
“This record represents a period of time in my life way more than anything I’ve ever written before,” says Kempner, who notes that the swirling “If You Met Her” and the piano-tinged “At Night I’m Alright With You” could represent the opposing poles of the record. “One of them is about love, and the other one is about death—it was a really healthy experience for me to find my own dialogue within that,” she says. “There’s so much that you learn and read, and other people’s experiences that you internalize, that you try to then base your own on. It was helpful to carve my own path for that.”
Part of what makes A Place I’ll Always Go so striking is the way it channels feelings of anxiety — heart-racing moments both exhilarating and crushing — into songs that feel well-worn and comforting.
The hushed confessionalism of “Carnations” and the fugue state described in the stripped-down “Feeling Fruit” are snapshots of moments marked by big, confusing feelings, but they’re taken with compassion and honesty—two qualities that have defined Palehound’s music from the beginning.
With The Drums’ new Abysmal Thoughts, band founder Jonny Pierce is making the exact album he’s always held in his heart. Of course, this is The Drums, so that heart is broken—but there’s beauty and even bliss in this kind of heartbreak, as well as that special kind of glorious delirium that comes from taking everything life can throw at you and still walking away triumphant. If Abysmal Thoughts doesn’t sound at all abysmal—really, Pierce has rarely been this irresistibly pop—that’s because this is a story about how to figure out what happiness means once the worst has already happened. “Happiness can be confusing to me,” says Pierce. “It shows up out of nowhere, and before you can even get used to it, it’s vanished. But Abysmal Thoughts? I can rely on them—and with the political chaos that is raining down, who knows when these dark feelings will subside?”
As the last album cycle for the Drums finished and his long-term relationship with his former partner dissolved, Pierce took some time away from music altogether in hopes to reconnect with himself and find future inspiration. Determined to make a change, he ended up leaving his longtime home in New York and found himself isolated in a large empty apartment in Los Angeles, all his plans for life and love suddenly in shambles: “I said I wanted to let life happen?” he says. “Well, the universe listened and life began to fuck me real good! But honestly, I make the worst art when I’m comfortable. The stuff that resonates with me the longest—and that resonates with others—is always the stuff that comes out of my hardships and confusion.”
“Head Of The Horse” by The Drums from the album ‘Abysmal Thoughts,’ available June 16th
Steph Knipe asks a lot of questions on Soft Spots, the new album from Adult Mom , their bedroom project-turned-indie band. Some have to do with sex (“Do you full-screen your porn? / Do you think about me as you watch her crawl across the floor?”), others with validation (“If I am good — if I am REALLY fucking good — will you validate me?”). All of them gesture towards the album’s overarching, frequently autobiographical narrative: a quest for queer truth, self-acceptance and love, a war waged against gender dysphoria and lingering trauma.
Percolated through Knipe’s velvety alto and the band’s sunny, emo-pop palette, the aforementioned queries blossom from a highly personal dialogue into a comforting, contemplative conversation, the artist’s pain acting as a vessel for our own, regardless of gender identity. After all, the emotional hazards dotting the long, bruising path to adulthood don’t discriminate. Pain unites us all, especially in today’s uncertain times.
Adult Mom “Soft Spots” LP/CD/Cassette/Digital out 5/19/17 on Tiny Engines Records
Indie rock quartet Cende formed in 2013 while living at Brooklyn house venue David Blaine’s The Steakhouse, and bonding over their mutual admiration for punk band The Marked Men. They had just graduated from SUNY Purchase, the college that was early home to Double Double Whammy—the label founded by LVL UP, a band in which members of Cende also play.
On their debut full-length, the group contrast the melodic and the offbeat, marrying “sunny power pop instrumentals to devastated breakup songs and existential freakouts for a confusing but exciting dissonance,” . It’s out on Double Double Whammy.
This is such wonderful bedroom pop. It makes me think of the Softies, though the sonic palette is quite different. The lyrics get a bit burry in favor of overall tone, but that sound! You could curl up in it and feel like it’s an endless, slightly sad mid-afternoon forever . Swanson makes beautiful, layered music that mostly resists classification: too pop to be electronic, too soft to be rock, too X to be Y, too A to be B — she’s heard it all before. No wonder she felt strange: her music is one of in-betweens.
Take “Lake,” the opening song off Yohuna’s long-time-coming debut LP, Patientness, which is now available on Orchid Tapes (and includes a re-recorded version of beloved, Hunger Games-referencing “Badges” . With a bittersweet cloud of synth and guitar, “Lake” sounds like a summer spent in the shade of a tree, a meditation on a passing moment. The light on the lake/ How it gives and it takes/ Like a summer/ Far away, she sings. It sounds a little electronic, a little rock, and a little pop. But it’s not quite any of those things.
Swanson grew up in the Wisconsin countryside, going to church three times a week. Her town was quiet but her family was musical: her mother, at one point, provided musical therapy as a hospice chaplain, and her father played classical piano. Swanson grew up singing in choirs and acting in musicals , honing an interest in songwriting that would follow her through college at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and through her later stints in New Mexico, Berlin, and finally, Brooklyn.
Swanson first came to New York as part of the live-in residency program at Brooklyn DIY arts space the Silent Barn, but was quickly displaced by a fire last September. “I really don’t know if [Patientness] would have happened if [the fire] hadn’t,” she said. “Things like that just force you to prioritize.” She was the one who discovered the fire, so moving back in was no longer an option – the memory of that day made her physically sick. It was around this time that she began working with Canadian composer Owen Pallett , and recording Patientness — the title a suitable mantra for such personally turbulent times.
The album’s title is reminder of things just over the horizon, and the fleeting nature of what’s happening now. I would like to be hung over/ With the sun streaming over us/ That’s when things are normal, Swanson sings on “World Series.” Hangovers may be unpleasant, but they are also proof that we’re real. That’s where you find Yohuna — not hungover necessarily, but somewhere in the middle — of then and now, of happy and sad….just trying to feel real.
Written, arranged, and performed by Yohuna. Yohuna is Johanne Swanson.
Adelyn Strei sang, played guitar, and co-wrote “Golden Foil”.
Felix Walworth played drums.
Emily Sprague played mellotron.
Warren Hildebrand played bass.
Owen Pallett played a lot of things.
Production and engineering on “Creep Date” by Jake Yuhas and Miles Coe.
Produced by Yohuna and Owen Pallett.
The Fat Angel Sings 