Album Review: Soccer Mommy Searches for Calm on 'Color Theory'

Nashville singer-songwriter Sophie Allison stretches out on her sophomore album, a melancholic examination of her deepest struggles. 

Written by Carys Anderson

Photo courtesy of Brian Ziff

Sophie Allison broke into the indie rock bubble with self-reflective songs about her relation to other people. Clean, her 2018 debut LP under the Soccer Mommy moniker, is stuffed with ballads of unrequited love, empowered exits from power imbalances, and singalong dreams of being as cool as someone’s last girl. 

On her second offering, Feb. 28’s color theory, Allison focuses not on her partners, but on herself. Clean’s space for romantic vulnerability is expanded; its successor spends time evaluating all aspects of its writer’s psyche. Where compact hooks once soundtracked the extremity of young love, Allison takes greater care to navigate the uncertain waters of her inner turmoil. 

Album opener “bloodstream” right away signifies a loss of innocence by contrasting the current Allison with her past self. The track’s imagery juxtaposes a little kid with rosy cheeks with a pale young woman trying to recapture that youthful happiness; the blood in her cheeks is now a red river flowing “from my knuckles into the sink.” “bloodstream” sees Allison expressing her frustrations with her mental illness, asking “What did you have that I didn’t? And why am I so blue?” Painting a picture of an idyllic childhood of bare knees and fireflies, Allison reflects on how the depression she first felt in adolescence never really fades  — it’s always right under the surface. When she finds a brief moment of peace, she sings that “it’s a half-hearted calm, the way I’ve felt since I was 13.” Across color theory, Allison searches for that true calm she’s been missing. 

This nonsensical spiral of depression is personified in “circle the drain,” with a hook that rests on Allison’s admission that “things feel that low sometimes, even when everything is fine.” The sweetness of her voice and the casual instrumental of jingly guitars contrasts the immobility Allison details, singing that she’s “chained to my bed … watching TV alone til my body starts aching.” Allison’s lyrical talent lies in her ability to pinpoint the most specific aspects of universal experiences, like depression, while revealing the darkest parts of herself. 

After the guitar swirl of its opening tracks, “royal screw up” dials in on Allison. With only an acoustic guitar behind her, the singer analyzes a failed relationship before ultimately placing the blame on herself, the “princess of screwing up.” In an album that is undoubtedly a studio experiment — echoey vocals and strange samples abound — its quiet moments are arresting. Allison’s breaths are audible between short, sing-song admissions of her deepest flaws. “You save pretty girls like me, but I’m not so pretty when I am naked,” she deadpans, before explaining the incompatibility between her and her partner: “I am ‘fake it till you make it’ in a can / And you have a calmness that I could never understand.” Allison is unrelenting in her desire to vocalize her issues; here, it’s her tendency to project her problems onto others.

This lyrical style calls to mind Fiona Apple, an influence of Allison’s who solidified her brand of conscious self-destruction on her second album, When The Pawn…, over 20 years ago.There, Apple implores a lover to escape the “beast” she lets inside her brain. On “royal screw up,” Allison, the “dragon” in her own story, warns: “You let me in and you will regret it.” The build up of Allison’s self-reflection leads to one of her most simple, but affecting, lines: “I am the problem for me, now and always.”

Photo courtesy of Loma Vista Recordings

color theory’s seven minute-plus centerpiece, “yellow is the color of her eyes,” is Allison distilled. Dreamy, meandering guitar is grounded by mid-tempo chugging, setting the stage for one of Allison’s most personal subject matters. In a resigned love letter to her mother, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness when she was 12, Allison struggles to face the finite, unpredictable concept of time. “I’m thinking of her from over the ocean,” she sings, separated by the distance of touring, before sighing in her most devastating lyricism yet: 

Loving you isn’t enough
You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done
I’ll know the day when it comes
I’ll feel the cold as they put out my sun

Where past Soccer Mommy releases chose between pop hooks and quiet meditations, “yellow” stakes claim to it all. 

Beyond these vulnerable moments of poetry, color theory’s most interesting moments  diversify the album’s mid-tempo soundscape. The acrobatic, dual-guitar stylings of past favorites like “Try” and “Your Dog” return in “crawling in my skin,” a song that puts head-bobbing melodies to Allison’s experiences with sleep paralysis. 

The album ends with “gray light,” a melancholic combination of tape rewind samples set to the hook “I’m watching my mother drown.” At three minutes, it’s an abrupt ending to an album bent on expansion. But in a project steeped deeply in mortality, it makes sense. Allison spends most of color theory taking her time, letting us in, only for the end to be swept out from under the floor. And that’s how life is — when the time comes, why drag it out?