The songwriter Sophie Allison has built a following with her Bandcamp bedroom recordings, but on this new record, she upgrades to a full band, giving her mournful songs a little extra drive.
For any songwriter with an achy heart and some basic recording software, Bandcamp has become a bit like what LiveJournal was a half generation ago: a network of sensitive souls, broadcasting feelings they would never share in person. Of course, most of these songwriters never find much of an audience, but Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison is among the relative few who have built a real following through the site. For the last couple of years, she’s provided listeners a play-by-play as she’s internalized the rejection of one unrequited love after another over a series of lonesome EPs with titles like songs from my bedroom and songs for the recently sad.
Allison’s voice has the same captivatingly mournful quality as naturals like Julie Doiron and Elliott Smith, so she’s well suited for this territory. Increasingly, though, she’s begun pushing back against her reputation for “sad girl music,” both in interviews and in the studio, where the upgrade to a full band has given her songs a little extra drive. Her latest release and first for Fat Possum, Collectioncatalogs that shift, reworking six tracks from her Bandcamp recordings and packaging them with a pair of new songs, “Out Worn” and “Allison.” For every mopey track, there are one or two peppy ones.
She doesn’t overdo it. An occasional stab of synthesizer is the closest these songs come to pomp, and the production is still scruffy around the edges, hi-fi only by the standards of her early self-recordings. But the improved fidelity lets her words and voice come across clearer than they did from the bedroom, revealing how much more elegant Allison’s wordplay is than it can seem at first blush, and her gift for detailing conflict with the economy of a young adult novel. Every song introduces an untenable situation, with Allison stuck in a rut, questioning a relationship, or hung up on an unavailable crush.
She’s especially prone to that last scenario. After a cute stranger brushes against her on the street on “Try,” she’s consumed by the fantasies that flood her brain. On the similarly light and jangly “Benadryl Dreams,” those kinds of fantasies wear her down as she curses the unknowing object of her desire with the album’s best line: “You’ve been spending all your time living on the backsides of my eyes.” And on the sobering “3 AM at a Party,” she casts herself as that most enduring of romantic movie archetypes: the best friend that the oblivious guy really ought to be with. “I wish you never got your heart so broke,” she sings, “I wish you didn’t sleep with her when you were drunk.” Here Allison doesn’t even allow herself to get her hopes up. “You deserve better yet you’ll never see,” she laments.
Especially on Collection’s more riff-centric tunes, Allison can’t help but invite comparisons to Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, another sharp, personable songwriter who got her start self-recording dreamy music in her bedroom. But where Duterte has fleshed out that very common sound into something completely her own—her latest, Everybody Works, is an expansive, nostalgic imagining of a pop album distinguished by some spectacularly creative productive choices—Allison isn’t there yet. She hasn’t figured out how to take full advantage of the studio, or how to create a sense of place with her music now that she’s left the bedroom behind. She’s got the songs, but she’s still piecing together a vision.
There are signs she’ll get there, though. The record’s best tune is one of the new ones, “Out Worn,” a DTMFA (“dump the motherfucker already”) anthem where she plays to the crowd like never before. Its proud chorus hits like an awakening: “I’m sick of living in the eye of a storm,” Allison sings, her voice suddenly flushed with determination. “I want the feeling of being admired/You only taught me to be out worn.” The only song on Collection with a clear resolution, it feels like a turning point: The moment she vowed to stop being a passive player in her own songs and started taking action. If it’s a sign of what’s to come, it’s an exciting one.
