Photo credit: Summerfest
Few artists chronicle heartache quite as efficiently as Sophie Allison. As Soccer Mommy, the 21-year-old Nashville songwriter captured the sting of unrequited crushes on a string of lo-fi Bandcamp EPs with self-explanatory titles like Songs From my Bedroom and Songs For the Recently Sad. Even when she dialed up the guitars a bit and embraced the studio on Clean, her excellent full-length debut for Fat Possum this year, she left her plainspoken emotions at the front and center of every song. It’s a tuneful, understatedly witty album that captures the essence of the teenage experience.
Without leaning on cheap sonic signifiers, Allison draws heavily from the ’90s, especially acts like Liz Phair and Julianna Hatfield, similarly snappy songwriters who didn’t apologize for their femininity or their feelings. Playing for a respectable crowd Sunday afternoon at Summerfest’s Johnson Controls Stage, Allison looked the part—you could have mistaken her for a 1994 Spin magazine cover—but despite her slacker posture, the music was sharp and purposeful. Flanked by a backing trio, her pleasantly mellow, no-frills set was a paradise of precise, blissful guitars.
Even when she retired the band for a short solo set, she commanded the crowd’s full attention. The stakes in her songs may be low—she sings of the especially ephemeral kind of heartbreak we all remember from our youth—but that didn’t make them sting any less. If anything, their relatability made them that much more potent.
Read more of our Summerfest coverage, including picks, previews and reviews, here.
