By Genre: Indie Pop
Top Tracks: “bloodstream,” “royal screw up,” “night swimming,” “yellow is the color of her eyes”
“Damn, I BARELY left my room in the past week.” Soccer Mommy’s recent Tweet, a quotation from “bloodstream” off new album COLOR THEORY, has gained painful weightiness in the context of a crumbling, self-quarantined world order, speaking pointedly to my ass-in-bed status. I’ve been putting off a review of Soccer Mommy’s COLOR THEORY not for not lack of love, but rather for fear of piercing relevance. The album cuts—a cut of the first-love, sick-parent, ennui-of-early-adulthood variety. Trepidation: Warranted.
But the universe, on occasion, rewards procrastinators, and Sophie Allison, the voice and mastermind behind Soccer Mommy, fittingly kicked off NPR’s retooled Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series. Characteristic pigtails flouncing, Allison performed the first three songs on COLOR THEORY, presenting the music exactly as I imagine it to be: a fast-talking confessional caught live in the intimacy of her very own bedroom. That Allison heard on the album is more than just curated ‘90s nostalgia, she is real. And in her Tiny Desk, we are witness to the place where nascent kernels of her lyrical genius are born.
The ode to inspirational predecessors across COLOR THEORY is palpable, namely Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift, but Soccer Mommy is a voice of her own. A veritable strength of Allison’s artistry has been her lyricism, rendering brutal honesty sans additives. “royal screw up” begins with a zinger: “I am a liar / And my truths are shackled in / My tension of fire / I’m the princess of screwin’ up.” Over a repetitive strum, Allison enumerates a litany of professed flaws, the result of which is a catchy tune at once self-deprecating and self-reflective, infusing a humorous sensibility into the already apparent candor.
COLOR THEORY’s concept taps vaguely into a long line of artistic thought—“color theory” is a guide to mixing colors with contributions from da Vinci, Newton, and Goethe. Allison explores difficult emotions in colors (blue, yellow, grey) while loosely linking a lyrical grouping of songs to blue’s depression, yellow’s malaise, and grey’s tedium. With lines like, “Sedate me all the time / don’t leave me with my mind” on “crawling in my skin” or “I’ve been choking out truths that I couldn’t swallow” on “yellow is the color of her eyes,” those color tones come across as undoubtedly dark; although the album largely evokes a hazy dalliance, the meaning is evinced by morose musings—the thematic dichotomy between music and lyric foregrounds an exquisite pain.
Soccer Mommy builds to the height of the album through a string of well-produced avowals, making the first half of COLOR THEORY decidedly catchier than the latter. Iterating on sinking stones and breaking bones, “bloodstream,” “circle the drain,” “royal screw up,” and “night swimming” seem resigned to fate, characterized by the easy simplicity of ‘90s garage rock. Both “circle the drain” and “night swimming” feature added sounds—people bustling, bubbles popping. The effects are particularly noticeable in the latter, as distortion pedals, mandolin, and the sounds of people chattering establish a sense of isolation. The music shimmers around the vocals, recalling the slippery, elusive fish of memory and distance; Soccer Mommy’s lyrics happen on the inside while the rest of the world continues outside. On a chorus of “sinking stone,” everything cuts out except guitar, landing like the thud of rock in water. Breezy noise filters back in and the song ends in a trance-like dream state.
“yellow is the color of her eyes,” the seven-minute apex of the piece, stuns with a lilting melody and gauzy, shoegaze instrumentation. With her nasal affect, Allison sings, “I’m thinking of her from over the ocean / see her face in the waves, her body is floating / and in her eyes, like clementines, I know that she’s fading / and the light of the sun is only a daydream.” The imagery is grounded in quotidian color (waves, clementine, sun) to describe the loss of life, Allison bravely plumbing interior depths via everyday means. She arrives at a masterful meditation on illness and the loss of a loved one, and in the chorus captures the core of grief: “Inside I’m still so blue / can’t erase the hue / It’s just colored over.”
COLOR THEORY is still Soccer Mommy, that’s for sure, but there is ironically something cleaner here in comparison to Allison’s 2018 debut, CLEAN. The key is precision—the stabilizing drum, the floppy disk-sampling keyboard, the ambient noises backing the jingle jangle swirl of guitar, the meandering melody, lending an air of choosy instrumentation. As a child of the late ‘90s, I hear it and feel a nostalgia for a childhood that wasn’t even my own—relegated partially to memory, partially to fiction. COLOR THEORY is steeped in a particular era, but is timeless in its melancholy.
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