The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, March 11, 2020 — 5A

Sophie Allison — or as the 

music world knows her — 
Soccer Mommy, has spent the 
last year and a half since the 
release of her debut album 
Clean on the rise. In 2019, 
Allison 
performed 
at 
some 

of the most prominent music 
festivals of the year, including 
Coachella and Governors Ball. 
She released the single “Lucy” 
in early November 2019, and 
then followed it up with single 
“yellow is the color of her 
eyes.” On Feb. 28, 2020, Allison 
released her sophomore studio 
album, Color Theory. Soccer 
Mommy’s fans were eager for 
more of her signature style, 
with her sweet, airy vocals that 
sometimes go rough during the 
climax of a song. 

The 
two 
aforementioned 

singles 
were 
perfect 

predecessors for the release. 
Where Clean was Allison’s edgy, 
powerful and raw entrance 
into the world of popular 
alternative music, Color Theory 
is the album that shows how 
comfortable she has become in 
the industry. Songs like “Lucy” 
and 
“bloodstream” 
channel 

even more of an alternative-
rock sound than what was 
present on Clean. Instead of 
overloading the project with 
slow ballads, Allison uses songs 
like “night swimming” and 
“crawling in my skin” as the 
deeper cuts. While these tracks 
are certainly emotional, they’re 
not slow and sad. 

Though the album as a whole 

is almost perfectly unified, 
there are spots where the album 
drags a little, which diminishes 
the 
effect 
of 
other 
songs. 

For example, “stain,” a song 
that has a guitar pattern that 
sounds just like the beginning 
to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” 

does not fit in with the feel-
good sounds of the rest of the 
album. Having this song second 
to last slows down the album in 
a way that doesn’t give the last 
song, “gray light,” the justice it 
deserves. While “gray light” is 
slower, it’s an almost uplifting 
song, but following in the dark, 
unnecessarily sad shadow of 
“stain” makes it less powerful. 
While “yellow is the color of 
her eyes” is a beautiful song 
and was a great choice as one of 
the album’s singles, its length is 
a little excessive. Fortunately, 

Allison follows it up with “up 
the walls,” a short and bouncy 
song clocking in at just over two 
and a half minutes. 

Allison took her sadness 

and pain and made it into an 
album that (miraculously) isn’t 
a huge bummer. Clean is the 
perfect album to listen to when 
you need a good hour-long cry. 
Color Theory is the album for 
your recovery. Though much of 
the subject matter isn’t happy, 
like heartbreak and distance, 
I still somehow leave listening 
to the album feeling at peace. 
Allison creates a distinct sense 
of hope on even her saddest 
songs off of Color Theory. The 
best example of this comes at 
the end of her last song, “gray 
light.” While it’s definitely a 
sad song, it rapidly culminates 
to an ending that then cuts 
out prematurely. Closing the 
album on a perhaps unfinished 
note leaves the ending open, 
conveying an indistinguishable 
feeling of hope for the future. I 
truly don’t know how she does 
it, but maybe that mystery is 
what makes Soccer Mommy so 
damn good.

Soccer Mommy on the rise

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

GIGI CIULLA
Daily Arts Writer

ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW

One of the biggest weeks 

of the year for many DIY 
bands is the week of South by 
Southwest, a week-long arts 
festival in Austin, Texas that 
features 
independent 
films, 

musicians and other artists. 
Groups often plan week-long 
tours on their way to Austin in 
hopes of promoting their music 
and expanding their audience at 
the festival. This year, however, 
there’s been a change of plans; 
due to the over looming threat of 
COVID-19, the city of Austin has 
decided to cancel the festival.

This is the first time in the 

event’s 34-year history that 
anything like this has happened, 
and bands are not thrilled. 
Many 
of 
these 
bands 
use 

South by Southwest as a yearly 
opportunity to gain exposure 
from 
different 
publications, 

websites and music fanatics at 
large. With the announcement 
coming less than two weeks 
before the festival was slated to 
begin, the hours of preparation 
and effort these groups put into 
planning their trips has gone 
out the window, with many 
scrambling to find any and all 
opportunities to play around 
the city.

The city’s decision to cancel 

the 
festival 
comes 
at 
the 

recommendation 
of 
Austin’s 

Public Health officers. After 
declaring 
a 
local 
disaster, 

Mayor Steve Adler canceled the 
festival. SXSW, in a statement, 
said they were devastated, but 
they would “faithfully follow 
the City’s directions.”

The SXSW crisis also signals 

another issue the coronavirus 
could potentially lead to: concert 
attendance. DIY musicians fund 
their tours through small door 
fees which allow them to pay 
for tour expenses like gas and 

food. However, with the fear of 
large public events that COVID-
19 has instilled in a growing 
percentage 
of 
the 
world’s 

populous, touring bands may 
not be able to depend on these 
shows as much for support. This 
also presents a larger issue for 
more established bands that use 
music as their full-time career 
and depend on touring revenue 
as income. 

Many travel-based industries, 

like airlines, are already seeing 
a significant decline in profits 
in just the past few weeks, and 
I believe we will see similar 
trends in the entertainment 
industry. Especially in the age 
of streaming, artists rely heavily 
upon the money made from 
touring — to lose that source of 
income could be devastating to 
many musicians. 

I’m not sure how basement 

shows will be affected by this 
outbreak, but I doubt it will 
increase attendance. Though 
I’ve definitely seen a small 
increase in attendance at local 
shows 
recently, 
I’m 
fairly 

certain that being in a dark, 
damp and crowded basement 
probably will not help to prevent 
the virus’s spread. Not only 
could this cause a decrease in 
the amount of shows around 
town, but also discourage out-
of-town bands from coming 
into a town containing a large 
population of college students 
who just returned from spring 
break.

That being said, now is a 

more 
important 
time 
than 

ever to support artists through 
purchasing 
albums 
and 

merchandise. I know some local 
Michigan groups, like Shadow 
Show and Dogleg, were planning 
on heading down to SXSW after 
gaining a considerable amount 
of popularity in the past year. 
Supporting these local artists, 
even just a little bit, could make 
a huge difference, especially as 
we enter a time where live music 
could suffer a significant loss in 
attendance.

RYAN COX

Daily DIY Columnist

Ryan Cox: COVID-19, the 

live music epidemic

WARNER

DAILY DIY COLUMN

About a third of the way 

through Jenny Offill’s second 
novel, “Dept. of Speculation,” 
the unnamed narrator gives a 
brief account of Manichaeism: 
“The 
Manicheans 
believed 

the world was filled with 
imprisoned light, fragments of 
a God who destroyed himself 
because he no longer wished 
to exist,” the narrator notes 
dispassionately. Like a good 
deal of the other fragments that 
make up the novel, this anecdote 
is never explicitly explained or 
tied into a thematic concern 

— it just stands as-is for the 
reader to interpret how they 
would like to. Sometimes these 
anecdotal pieces come back 
when something else reminds 
the narrator of it. 

Offill doesn’t coyly include 

passages that state the aims 
of her game, but this passage 
works for an encapsulation of 
her method and its place in 
the history of the novel — she 
scatters fragments of a Realist 
god that no longer works for the 
narrative aims of contemporary 
authors. In lieu of a quest, 
we 
have 
crate-digging 
and 

rumination, 
the 
movement 

of ideas in a mind. Each little 
fragment is a premise the 
narrator is testing, a moment 

to consider and weigh in the 
mesh of the whole. Historical 
anecdotes and quotes from 
writers have the same weight 
in the narrator’s mind as the 
literal events of her life. All of 
it is evidence. There’s no real 
quest for an Offill narrator, 
there’s just a lot of casting 
around, like a person after a 
shipwreck grabbing for pieces 
of driftwood. 

It’s a useful form to depict 

a crisis with no easy answer. 
In “Dept. of Speculation” this 
crisis was a woman considering 
separation from an adulterous 
husband who she clearly still 
cares for. In her new novel, 
“Weather,” 
Offill’s 
narrator 

is a deeply empathetic person 

trying to reckon with climate 
change, a problem that doesn’t 
really have any solutions on 
the level of the individual. 
The title is apt — the word 
“weather” 
can 
be 
thought 

of as the phenomenological 
experience of climate on a day-
to-day basis. You might notice 
that it’s getting warmer earlier 
in the year or that it’s raining 
more, but all you’re really doing 
is being anecdotal. You’re not 
talking about the climate. 

The 
outside 
citations 
in 

“Weather” are a little more 
focused than in “Dept. of 
Speculation.” 
Lizzie, 
the 

failed 
grad 
student 
and 

current librarian was writing 
a dissertation on comparative 
religion when she dropped out 
of school and is married to a 
similarly failed classicist. The 
fragments that Lizzie culls 
to look at her own life are 
frequently 
considerations 
of 

ethics and morality. She seems 
to share the ambivalence of a 
lot of millennials and younger 
Gen-Xers, 
an 
aversion 
to 

unqualified earnestness that 
dovetails with very real concern 
about the direction society is 
moving. Her commitment to 
compassion stands out — she 
takes a car service run by a man 
named Jimmy who lost the rest 
of his drivers (she says she does 
it “because I’m ridiculous”). At 
one point, Lizzie finds herself 
repeating a mantra in the 
shower — “Sentient creatures 
are numberless. I vow to save 
them.”

Lizzie’s porousness, the way 

things tend to get under her 
skin, makes her unsuited for the 
job she starts at the beginning 
of the novel — she works for 
her former dissertation adviser, 
Sylvia, who travels around for 
a series of TED-like lectures 

and maintains a podcast about 
the end of the world. Lizzie’s 
job is to respond to the emails 
listeners of the podcast send 
in. Lizzie gets swept up into 
the world of the weirdos and 
doomsday preppers who ask 
Sylvia questions — even as 
Lizzie makes fun of them 
and 
maintains 
a 
kind 
of 

critical distance, she starts 
to participate in their world, 
to read “prepper” blogs and 
start stockpiling lighters and 
first-aid equipment. In the 
meantime, she is taking care of 
her brother, a former addict who 
is engaged to a woman Lizzie 
doesn’t 
like 
(she 
describes 

her as “a weird mix of hard-
edged 
and 
hippie-minded”), 

taking care of her son Eli and 
negotiating life as a working 
mother in Brooklyn. Her life 
continually intersects with her 
work in strange ways, and part 
of the pleasure of this novel is 
the sense of total immersion 
in someone’s mind that Offill’s 
atemporal narrative methods 

allow for. 

This 
novel 
is 
more 

thematically 
compact 
than 

“Dept. of Speculation,” which 
tended to sprawl a little. It’s 
also more fluidly organized: 
instead of the chapter breaks 
in the earlier novel (what are 
those for exactly?) “Weather” 
is split into six long sections 
of continuous movement. It 
plays to the advantages of the 
form, driving home the free-
fall quality. Offill seems to have 
a better grasp on the different 
uses of the fragment form here. 
“Dept. of Speculation” was 
pretty 
consistently 
all-over-

the-place; in “Weather” there 
are moments that resemble 
the paragraphs of traditional 
fiction and there are moments 
that resemble the discontinuity 
of a Twitter feed. In all 
respects — the development of 
the thematic concerns, the skill 
with which the form is used — 
this novel feels like a graceful, 
organic 
progression 
from 

the earlier book at a moment 
where the form Offill helped 
inaugurate is at risk of being 
reduced to a cliché or a stock 
method.

Tackling climate change in 
Jenny Offill’s new novel

BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Weather 

Jenny Offill

Knopf Publishing 

Group

Feb. 11, 2020

Clean is the 

perfect album to 
listen to when you 
need a good hour-

long cry. Color 
Theory is the 
album for your 

recovery.

The SXSW crisis 

also signals 
another issue 
the coronavirus 
could potentially 
lead to: concert 

attendance.

In her new novel, 
“Weather,” Offill’s 

narrator is a 

deeply empathetic 

person trying 
to reckon with 
climate change

Color Theory 

Soccer Mommy 

Loma Vista 
Recordings