Soccer Mommy: Color Theory | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Synthesia is the sensory-crossing condition which in some forms, allows those who experience it to see words, emotions and sounds as inherently linked to specific colours. Pop musicians are periodically drawn into the surrounding conversation: Pharrell says he doesn’t know where he’d be without synthesia and Lorde credits it for the vivid intensity of her album Melodrama.

Sophie Allison, who fronts Nashville’s Soccer Mommy, offers a very different take on hue with her latest release, Color Theory. Following up on 2018’s Clean, an album the New York Times labelled a favourite of the decade, is a tall order, especially as Allison moves away from the bedroom production that was appropriate for somebody uploading songs to bandcamp while still in school.

Color Theory, with its ten tracks mostly written in green rooms and tour buses, is structured around three chromatic acts - blue, to evoke melancholy, depression and self-harm; yellow, for illness in body and mind; and grey, for loss, and decay. The disciplined framework allows Allison to carefully wade through a swampland of densely intertwined ideas, feelings and traumas without all of the songs blurring together.

Bloodstream, at the top, introduces the struggle she’s had with holding onto happiness since childhood. Allison’s rhythm guitar is met with nostalgic piano, metallic licks, wobbly distortion and ominous, whirring static, which form a jarring backdrop for a scrapbook of memories that edge towards the disturbing. It’s the first taste of a new suite of textures she’s been playing with since going full-time on the project, alongside producer Gabe Wax, known for his work with The War on Drugs and Big Thief.

Circle the Drain could easily have found its place alongside mid-oughts pop-punk staples from Avril Lavigne and Ashley Simpson. Like Phoebe Bridgers, there’s a sense that Allison is using the song to simply take note of the misery she feels is a constant in her life. “Hey, I’ve been falling apart these days,” she sings, in a totally non-threatening manner. The overly poppy treatment here feels like a way of gentling broaching something more troublesome.

Night Swimming is a near-perfect grafting of Allison’s songwriting and her aesthetic vision. The confessional address is full of rich, dream-like descriptions of the “moon.. in the water” as she “[dances] with the current”, leaving clothes on the beach. Snippets of gulls sit behind the sound of water lapping the shore, swelling strings and a glimmering harp part.

The song is also the only one on the record with a prominent romantic angle. The relationship featured most heavily on color theory is the complex one Allison shares with her mother, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when the singer was much younger. On yellow is the color of her eyes, she spends seven sprawling minutes confronting her paralysis in the wake of her mother’s illness, finally singing “Loving you isn’t enough / You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done”. The optimistic, sun-dappled treatment of the track is finally broken by an elegiac, wailing guitar riff.

By the time we reach gray light at the close of the record, we are firmly in the territory of loss. The production is sparse, featuring a minimal drum loop with touches of lightly bent guitars and glitchy scuffmarks. It’s like sitting on a fault line and peering into a chasm, or a sinkhole. Allison feels like death pulls at her in the same way it pulls at her mother. “Am I just like you?” she asks. “Am I gonna be there way too soon?” It’s a disquieting end to an album that for the most part, makes rotting away sound very pretty; but it’s also proof that while Soccer Mommy might be straying from their lo-fi roots, there’s no loss of rawness to make up for.

- Aleisha McLaren.
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