Soccer Mommy
The Spin began a busy weekend with a stop at Exit/In on Friday for a Last Waltz-style holiday concert from The Lees of Memory, the new-ish psych-rock outfit fronted by longtime Superdrag bandleader John Davis. At that show, we fell well below the median age — we were probably among the few in attendance to not have to get a sitter for the night. But at Saturday’s Soccer Mommy gig at Mercy Lounge, we felt positively ancient as we made our way through a sea of denim-clad folks in their early 20s and up the stairs to the bar.
This very, very sold-out show functioned as a welcome-home party for Soccer Mommy, the project of 21-year-old Nashville native Sophie Allison, who enjoyed a breakout year in 2018. Allison is a rising star of the rock-camp generation — kids who caught the bug early, gaining not just a deep appreciation of music but a preternatural aptitude for it, along with a readiness for the big stage — and her Fat Possum debut Clean proved irresistible to listeners of all ages. It got a nod from Time in the middle of the year and cleaned up on year-end lists from Pitchfork to NPR to our very own critics’ poll, where it placed fifth.
Soccer Mommy
Allison has put thousands of miles on these tunes since we saw her at Third Man’s Blue Room on Record Store Day in April, including via stints on the road with Paramore and Liz Phair. She showed off subtle reinforcements to her live show’s look Saturday, with matching suits for her band (now numbering five with keyboardist-guitarist Rodrigo Avendano in the fold, on loan from Chicago-via-Nashville ambient greats Coupler) and warm, purple-and-red-hued lighting that nicely complemented the soft-focus glow of her songs.
And she’s got a lot of good ones already. Clean highlights “Cool,” “Your Dog” and “Last Girl” all received warm welcomes Saturday, their cavernous guitar tones, crisp percussion and top-shelf hooks offering much to swoon over. The set-closing one-two of “Scorpio Rising” and “Wildflowers,” played with minimal accompaniment, stopped the room in its tracks with its restrained power. Allison’s refreshingly unrehearsed between-song tour anecdotes expressed wonderment at the weirdness, but also the kindness, of strangers. She cracked us up with a story about some older audience members in Louisville who’d maybe had a few too many and threw her and her band off their game — but a crew of showgoers closer to her age stepped in to regulate.
“It’s why the kids are great,” Allison said. “They get drunk, but they don’t dance on each other in a weird way during a slow song.”
Soccer Mommy
Our only critique is also what seems to most endear Allison to her peers: that she’s one of them, less concerned with showmanship at this point than making sure nothing’s lost in translation as she brings her diaristic bedroom pop to the masses. These songs are objectively great, but sounded more or less identical to their recorded versions, and we couldn’t help but think about how they could pack even more of an emotional wallop with more meat on their bones. Still, Allison is way ahead of the curve, and she has the talent and poise to be a fixture for a long time. In the spring she’ll open up some dates for fellow albums-of-the-year favorite Kacey Musgraves — who also had an outstanding debut, but reached a whole new level later with her CMA-winning, Grammy-nominated third album Golden Hour. The openers for Musgraves’ run of Ryman shows in February and March haven’t been announced, but we’ve got fingers crossed that Allison and her band will be among them.
Motiongazer
Soccer Mommy six-stringer Julian Powell, alias Motiongazer, opened the evening with a modest set of meandering solo electric guitar explorations with liberal flanger usage. His nasally vocals brought to mind a pair of left-of-center troubadours from north of the border: Destroyer frontman and sometime New Pornographer Dan Bejar, and Nigel Chapman from Haligonian upstarts Nap Eyes. It felt decidedly like a work in progress, but at least it didn’t drone on too long.
Dream Wave
Dream Wave, however, was fantastic. The quintet led by Kelton Young played second on the bill, and their nimble, jazzy tunes conjured pleasant late-afternoon vibes, with shimmering guitars and hard-grooving bass lines to nod to with a closed-eyed smile. Fans of Jim O’Rourke, Yo La Tengo and Chicago post-rockers The Sea and Cake — among other names that would totally date us among Saturday night’s crowd — would do well to keep an eye out for this group.
See our slideshow for more photos.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
