color theory

When Sophie Allison sings, she sounds wide-open and guarded, casual and intense, intimate and coolly removed. In her best songs as Soccer Mommy, a piercing line —“I don’t wanna be your fucking dog,” for example, from “Your Dog”—wriggles away from direct interpretation as she delivers it, turning from declaration to hypothesis. Some of the magnetism of her pop-inflected indie rock comes from the winding shape of her melodies; in their unpredictable motion, they often resemble counterpoint written to a root melody that’s been erased. But a lot of her power derives from the immediacy of her voice—when she opens her mouth it’s as if a spotlight appears.

The songwriting of her earliest direct-to-Bandcamp material was still hazy at the edges, but by her 2018 studio debut Clean, a world-class indie rock singer-songwriter was standing in her place. It doesn’t always happen this way, but the acclaim followed her swiftly and her fanbase multiplied. She toured with Vampire Weekend and Wilco, with Liz Phair and Paramore and Kacey Musgraves. In another era, Clean might have landed her a lucrative major-label contract. In this era, she enters the low-level managerial world of a successful indie rock band, one in which you become your own manager and booker and agent, even if you also hire and pay those people. “I’m touring for a living and I run a small business, basically,” she told the New York Times last month. “It’s a very isolating existence.”

color theory exhibits much of the growth—and some of the growing pains—that usually attend massive transformations. She’s on Loma Vista now, home to fellow indie-label graduates like St. Vincent and Andrew Bird. It might not be Caroline or DreamWorks in the ’90s, but Allison makes the most of her opportunity, and the songs feel like a response to an exponential leap in platform and possibility.

As she did on Clean, she worked with producer Gabe Wax, who has also helmed projects by the War on Drugs, Deerhunter, and other indie A-listers. Where Clean was warm and rough-hewn, the product of a careful microphone set-up and mutual trust, color theory feels dazzled with the endless creative possibilities of the studio. The drizzle of acoustic and electric guitars on “lucy” feels fine-tuned to evoke memories of The Bends-era Radiohead. On the seven-minute-plus “yellow is the color of her eyes,” layers of Mellotron, Wurlitzer, and Prophet synthesizer (all played by Allison) lend the song the sleepy-eyed sheen of shoegaze. The drums on “circle the drain” are subtly sweetened by drum machine à la the work of ’00s pop hitmakers The Matrix, and its edges shimmer with drones and synths until it resembles one of the billowing soap bubbles in the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road.”

In deliberate contrast to the bright sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths darker. Allison has said the album depicts three states of being, represented by three colors: blue for depression, yellow for mental and physical illness, gray for mortality. Clean began with the urgency of youth, in the moment of a break-up; the first lyric of color theory opener “bloodstream” is wearier. Observing the “pale girl staring through the mirror,” she remembers the way blood used to flow “into my rosy cheeks” before she looks down: “Now a river runs red from my knuckles into the sink,” she sings, her voice flat and resigned. She is quick to qualify and complicate the alarming image (“Maybe it’s just a dream”) but the feeling resounds: color theory pitches headlong into the anomie of early-20s depression—the moment in adulthood when the bright colors of adolescence start to dim for the first time and it occurs to you, with dull alarm, that the rest of it might be like this.

As a lyricist, Allison keeps her footing in this more internal landscape. She has a skill for following winding syntax to a sharp point: “I am fake it till you make it in a can/And you have a calmness that I could never understand,” she sings on “Royal Screw Up,” a song that also includes the frank admission, “I am the problem for me/Now and always.” You can trace her admiration of Taylor Swift in how she follows a standard-issue pop-song metaphor until it yields a moment of truth: “I try to break your walls but all I ever end up breaking is your bones/And the bruises show/Standing in the living room talking as you’re staring at your phone/It’s a cold I’ve known,” she sings on “Nightswimming.” The paired couplets are neat as a folded napkin, and the alienation—who hasn’t felt dismissed by a brandished smartphone?—is palpable.

If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional; Allison has cited “bops” from her childhood like Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” as inspiration, and she has borrowed some of these songs’ chunky simplicity for her arrangements. The varied strum patterns that gave Clean’s songs their sinuous, lived-in feel have given way mostly to chugging down-stroked power chords, and the palette is bright, clean, and uncluttered. But she doesn’t tap into these anthems’ urge to shout from the rafters, even if what you’re shouting is that you’re desperate, rock-bottom, about to give up: The songs on color theory sometimes feels like a series of 8-point-font text messages projected onto highway billboards.

On the penultimate song “stain,” she casts off most of the instruments and leans into the microphone again, just her fingers gripping a pick and a backing of tense silence. The music instantly becomes corporeal, urgent—she has yet to locate this power within the glossy peaks of new sound she has churned up. “Now I’m always stained, like the sheets in my parents’ house/Yeah I’m always stained/And it’s never coming out,” she sings, and as the song cuts out—neatly, at exactly three minutes, one of the album’s shortest—your nerves jangle with the humming of the strings, your gut churns in simpatico with Allison’s.

Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly referenced New Pornographers and Barenaked Ladies as being signed to Loma Vista. They have since been removed.

Buy: Rough Trade

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