Got another release today from my own Sweaters & Pearls label.
If you would have told me I would be a part of 3 releases in the same year I would have...well the S&P accountants would have said "No way", but there's just been so much great stuff that I've really wanted to support and they just all came together pretty much at the same time. In the best way...this was by far the most ambitious project to date. Soccer Mom signed recently with 100m Records and said they were putting out this 6 song EP, they've always been huge vinyl fans and it made sense to see if we could put together a vinyl version of the release. When I saw the sleeve design Will had come up with, money was no object! I had always wanted to check out letterpressing a cover sometime, but the way it's pressed, the Soccer Mom and the album title are covered by a wraparound vertical graphic, such a cool idea. It was beyond anything I'd ever come across and couldn't wait to have it in hand.
Soccer Mom has been evolving a lot since that first single. There's still a lot of '90s classic fuzz throughout this whole EP, taking all kinds of unconscious influences and coming up with their really unique take the classic sound. There's times when I'll catch a dead on Dinosaur Jr. style melody in "(A) Natural history" one minute and then Dan's vocal will have Lee Ranaldo natural detachment the next.
It's got all the looseness of those catchier Sonic Youth tracks, when they veer towards melody, finding that line that just makes sense, Soccer Mom is playing around with a similar experimental guitar approach, the unnatural sounds and combinations of rhythm and melody. They're distilled down into melody you can't over think. It's the track that works no matter how many times you perform it. The first song to warm up in the rehearsal space, because it's just fun.
"American shirt (Eagle Flag 911)" most closely resembles that Loveless style haze, the layers of guitar are working in a dense chorus and distanced slide echo. I wouldn't be surprised if this was days in a studio, but I've seen them play live and all of these odd sounds are incredibly coming from Will and Dan, and at incredible volume. Like The Big Sleep it's overwhelming to see live, the structures are all there, it starts to sound like it's coming from somewhere else, it takes up the space like nothing else. Or "Unwanted Sounds" which has layers of distorted huge guitars, both an intricate picked melody and massive MBV style dense walls done in a bouncy optimistic indie feel. When Dan comes in with an epic far off chorus vocal it adds up to a pop vision of Broken Water.
In "Celebrity Unrest", they find a hard distorted groove that starts out at that massive height and continues on that plateau the whole track, building another melody on top of melody, and like "High on Dad" just when you think it might be instrumental, Dan comes in vocally unable to hold back anymore. I love that economy...when there's something to say, come in. If the great mathy guitar back and forth on "Salty Wyoming" works somehow like two completely separate loops then that's it.
So glad I could have a tiny part in spreading the word and I just want to say to everyone who's picked up anything from the label, thanks a lot.
Go get this one from Sweaters and Pearls Records...or 100m records...(the price including shipping is the same).
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