Sometimes it is better to know little about an artist, to go into a concert unprepared, on a steep and rapid learning curve. Soccer Mommy (Sophie Allison) makes that relatively easy. The Swiss-American, raised in Nashville (but with no semblance of a country and western drawl) is good humoured, laid back and chatty from the off; interacting with the audience, praising both the venues she’s played in the city and cutely entering into a “which is better, Birmingham or Manchester?” debate, having performed at The Hare & Hounds in the West Midlands the night before.
Strangely though, and even though she looks like a ‘soccer mom’, albeit a very young one – she’s still only 20 – she misses the opportunity to get a United/City discussion going, a sure-fire means of warming up an audience here if it’s played right. Next time she will.
It quickly becomes apparent that she has short-circuited the long drawn-out route Taylor Swift (one of the artists to have influenced her) took from C&W to pop. Allison has said that the main influence on her song writing is indeed pop and that she likes to include “catchy elements” in her songs, forsaking any faux Nashville vibes. By and large she has succeeded though you won’t be humming most of them on the way home just yet.
Sophie Allison is one of that ever-expanding breed of pop/rock front women who belie any suggestion that females are the weaker species where music is concerned. While much of the impetus in her songs on the night came from her lead guitarist, something of a showman who likes to sink to and lie on the floor at any opportunity (though he can play, for sure), the attention is very much on her. She has a magnetism that is hard to get a handle on, having the appearance of ‘the girl next door’, softly spoken and with just a wispy little tattoo down her right arm to suggest any deviation from conformity.
She’s a music business graduate too, further evidence of her ability to manager herself.
Just less than half the (short, 11 songs including the encore) set came from her debut album proper, Clean, which was released earlier this year. She actually has a lot of material including two previous albums which emerged without much publicity but which generated a sizeable following and a host of it going back to her early-to-mid teens when she released copious amounts of songs on Bandcamp. So it was a little surprising that she chose to include a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’, as good as it was.
She can replicate the recorded songs well on stage, particularly those with jangly guitars as hers and the guitarist’s interact nicely with plenty of syncopation. The lyrics portray teenage angst in a way her audience will appreciate, many of them being teenagers themselves.
The band left the stage for a while as she performed a clutch of songs solo including the Springsteen cover. Judging from the applause it seems many of her fans prefer these stripped back performances where she’s as detached as she can be from reality but for me the highlight came with the closing song, with the full band, of ‘Scorpio Rising’ from Clean and what she describes as the album’s climax, where she realizes that “while I’ve been trying to be cool and detached, I’ve become attached — and now I’m about to lose everything because I’m pretending to be something I’m not.”
Together with an abundance of smart lyrics (sample “Oh she’s bubbly and sweet like a Coca-Cola/I watch from my drink as you look her over”) it is observations like that which put me in mind of several other New York-based (as she now is) female artists who were writing similar stuff at her age and who went on to great things.
The song, by the way, ends with a raucous jam in its live version unlike in the video here, in which she is cleverly transported into the closing scenes of Lars von Trier’s, 2011 psycho sci-fi end-of-world film drama, Melancholia. There’s clearly a lot going on with Ms. Allison and we may be seeing the early days of a significant star of the future.
Brooke Bentham could be Britain’s Soccer Mommy if she wanted to be but she has to up her game a little first. The South Shields lass has a lot going for her. Her contralto voice is good and powerful and from a distance she could be Adele. Compared to Sophie her guitar work is simple but it is only there to support her chops, not to supplant them.
I saw her last year, opening for John Smith. She was, and remains, extremely laid back, very much in the Fenne Lily mould. At one stage she observed that she “didn’t have much to say tonight” then spent almost two minutes between songs retuning her guitar without saying a word at all.
In her recorded work she employs a band but performed solo on the night which did detract a little from that recorded performance. The eight-song set demonstrated her range, varying from some that are close to laments to anthemic pop to those that rock, such as her latest single, ‘Out of my Mind’, which is reviewed in this week’s Tracks of the Week (#42). She finished, as I suspected she might, with ‘Heavy and Ephemeral’, still her best work.
A year older than Sophie Allison she’s about to head out as a headline artist herself, which she deserves but please Brooke, look and sound interested in what you’re doing.
Soccer Mommy/Brooke Bentham’s UK tour continues as follows:
08 September Liverpool, Shipping Forecast
10 September Nottingham, Bodega
11 September Bristol, Louisiana
13 September London, Scala
