Album Review: Softcore Revelations – SCR 3

The ongoing project of Los Angeles based underground poet Penny Ash, Softcore Revelations’ latest album is both revelation and catharsis.

Even just from reading the titles of the tracks, you can intuit that SCR 3 is about Ash looking within herself but also the world around her and finding ways to express her hopes, fears, and observations through music.

There’s no overarching theme in the arrangements, though synths play a large role in realising the emotional message Softcore Revelations want to relay to the listener. Ash uses the history of music to open the listener to her lyrics, slivers of recognition lowering your guard and making you ever more receptive to the lyrics.

Lube of My Resistance hits you with that duality straight away – Björk meets experimental electronic that draws you in, eager to know where it will take you next, fading out with an almost funereal air.

The tone soon evolves; Dream to Ghost shifts that to a dissonant take on theremin-like folk, while Rain Rain I Love Your Sound surrounds the listener with some classic sounds before hitting you with a melody – and vocals – that could easily be from a 1950s high school hop.

From there, you get the late-night romantic trap textures of Little Deaths and the twee/power pop energy of Sad Girl Summer, yet the changes in mood from song to song are unhurried and unforced.

Sad Girl Summer, especially, has a lyrical candour that has come from a different direction than the brassy, breezy indie arrangement – as if nodding to the discrepancies between 80s indie music as it was applied to women and the expectation of availability and innocence that was rife at the time.

SCR 3 is consistent from there on, using soundscapes to highlight and contrast within the lyrics, reaching an end point with If I Go. I viewed it as a counterpoint to the Lube of My Resistance, powered by a heartbeat and a vocal line that eschews a traditional melody. It feels like a final goodbye, not to life itself, but to a life as it is lived now – with some regrets, but not too many.

One of the pleasures and pitfalls of music is that it allows you to find your meaning within songs and arrangements, and for me, I felt that Ash was exposing me to the many expectations of women, often laden with contradictions, that exist through time down to the present day.

The album doesn’t adhere to the music template of riot grrrl, but the ethos of the scene breathes through SCR 3: music made mainly by women, about women, though others are welcome to listen and enjoy it.

Softcore Revelations’ SCR 3 was released on the 2nd of April and can be heard on Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud. Ash has stated that this may be the final release from the project; if so, it certainly goes out on a high note.