Review Summary: you don't drink even a couple of beers/and you don't smoke weed or face your favorite fears/and your dreams/the point of being seventeen.
What do you get when you mix Elliott Smith, Conor Oberst and an electric guitar (nothing else, just an electric guitar)? Probably what Soccer Mommy will eventually become, though it's not quite there yet.
Sophie Allison has been creating music for some time now, and there's videos of her performances on the internet that still have that magic allure early YouTube musicians once had: The video quality is bad, the mixing nonexistent, but everything about it is so unabashedly sincere you can't help but be taken by it. There's a strong feeling of nostalgia running through almost all of her songs, which is particularly true for this album, aptly titled "For Younger Hearts", i.e. for a time when things hurt more. And while some of the songs seem to possess the quality albums like Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" have in spades, namely a nostalgia filtered through the disillusionment of adulthood, "For Young Hearts" bathes in sincerity and angst, those most precious and abundant of teenage emotions.
This album is not about guitar virtuosity or controlled, deeply trained vocals, and the listener might even be slightly turned off of this record if those are things they're looking for. Instead, FYH is about moods, sad evenings, long nights spent walking around your neighborhood with nothing but your headphones and some change you kept from the last party. Every love story on this album rests unfulfilled, no more than whispered possibilities (touching closer "switzerland") or drunk confessions ("3 am at a party"), or even brief flings that have been committed to memory ("Inside Out"). The electric guitar work frames the songs in a way that seems warm and welcoming when its double tracked, or almost unbearably lonely when the it's just Allison and six strings, lamenting another evening gone wrong.
It's heartfelt like most media produced by and for young hearts is. There's lyrics here that seem torn straight out of a high schooler's scrapbook, in both good and bad ways:
soft face
playing in the autumn streets
with blood laced shoes
i fake
stomach aches when i'm in school
to wait there for you
(From "Skinned Knees")
But it's exactly this lack of restraint, the kind of restraint that comes with age, which ultimately makes some songs outstay their welcome and some moments dim in comparison to the album's highs. I'm not even sure whether Soccer Mommy herself would call this a debut album, since she's already re-recorded a number of songs from FYH for her sophomore anthology of songs, aptly called "Collection". Nevertheless, what's here is promising, and if you're walking home from another party gone wrong or just saw a picture of your first love getting engaged while you're feeling lonely and forgotten, "For Young Hearts" can and will hit harder than its twee nature might suggest.
Recommended Tracks:
Inside Out
Henry
3 am at a party
