Wow, just wow. Soccer Mommy were excellent, if you were lucky enough to be there there I'm sure you'll agree and if you missed it, you really did miss something great here. From the opening beats of Bones, into Circle The Drain then onto Shotgun, they had the crowd going from the off and it didn’t stop all way through their 15 song back-to-back brilliant set.
This gig was sold out weeks ago and ending up with a couple of tickets going spare earlier in the day, I shouldn’t have been surprised that they were snapped up within minutes of posting them (shout-out to the Fife lads for taking these!). Spares aside, it was a ‘who’s who’ of Edinburgh giggers as there were a bunch of discerning EH-postcoded Gigeratti - regularly spotted at this type of ‘not to be missed’ - Edinburgh shows. With me for this one were a few of the OAW gang, one half of Natural Order (a young local act I might’ve mentioned before) and an old flat-mate of sorts - Crunchity, who stayed next door to the infamous Purple Hoose of my late teens. I say next door – it was two flats of four young lads in each which basically turned into a household of eight and not an ounce of common sense between us all.
Our pre-gig chat covered (amongst other things); a Glastonbury debrief (consensus, by the festival’s own high standard not the greatest year of live sets); we think we’ve come up with the name for a new genre - a coverall for less traditional style singing; Shout-Rock (Idles, Sleaford Mods, Fontaines DC, Amy & The sniffers even, and a few unnamed others); and the joys of motorbiking round less fashionable parts of Europe (an incredible experience, not to be missed if you have the chance to do it).
The Dissection Lab of Summerhall was crammed early doors and if you’re not familiar with it, the standing area is an “L” shape, which has quite a big part of the floorspace off to the right away from the front of the stage - not all of which gives a full view of what's going on. We ended up just on the corner so we managed to see most of the band as they played, but the main thing – the music – sounded great. It was quite a mixed crowd and while there were a lot of “gig-elders” here, the majority were a younger demographic, which was made clear with the level of energetic enthusiasm shown to the band before, during and after every song.
On stage, they looked incredibly comfortable, and their relaxed approach came across well in their playing. Sophie Allison has been recording as Soccer Mommy for almost ten years and I’m not sure how long the band have been together with this line up, but they played and sounded like a very tight well-established unit, telepathic in how their individual sounds come together to produce some of the best Indie music out there. [As an old 80’s Indiekid, I’m not a fan of the extremely over-used term Shoegaze as a description for anything remotely Indie (it rarely was back in the day , if at all and so much of what’s described this way now isn’t either) but I think Soccer Mommy are exactly what should come out top of any search, definition or shining example of what really can be called Shoegaze].
Lost was introduced as a new song, which went down really well - as did all of the set - and a nice way of mixing it up later on was when two of the band took a break to leaving a trio to play, then the other two joining their bandmates off-stage to let Sophie take centre stage for a solo performance. Stand-out songs for me were the main set finale Yellow Is The Color Of Her Eyes and their encore Don’t Ask Me. Yellow is a song that wouldn’t look out of place alongside the best of Mercury Rev or The Flaming Lips catalogue for its sublime and drifting sound, and by contrast they ended on a hard-rocking high with Don’t Ask Me – the crowd were still buzzing for this as the lights came on at the end of the night.
If Soccer Mommy keep it up, I’m sure when they come back they’ll be promoted to a much bigger venue – I can only see them getting more popular as they continue to record and tour more. A final thanks to Natural Order Al for confirming the setlist with me for the playlist of the set (link below) – check them out and enjoy!
Great review. Will need to get them on my Spotify library.
Great gig - looking forward to the next album
Great review. Playing them just now, they are really good. Sounds like a great gig.