Soft Spot is a band based in Connecticut playing (as they describe it) “loud rock music, with a side of shoegaze and punk.” You now know everything they told me, except that I did discover there’s another band with the same name in Kentucky… so buyer beware! At any rate the real Soft Spot group has just released a new single titled Hey Now. Based on the few photos I was able to find, they are either a three-piece group of youngish men (guitar, bass, drums) or a four-piece band with the addition of a keyboard player. It looks like they’ve recently played some live shows in New York City and their home base of Connecticut.
“Hey Now” starts with a single overdriven guitar, blasting out chords while the faintest echo of an electronic keyboard trills in the background. When the “full band” kicks in, it’s basically the guitarist adding at least two more layers of power chords along with the bass, drums and keys. It’s a full sound, almost stepping beyond distortion but not quite!
The festivities quiet down just a bit for the vocalist, who has that laconic, world-weary delivery that’s familiar from major-label punk albums (I’m looking at you, Pearl Jam and Nirvana!). At first I thought the lyrics had to do with a fading relationship: “Hey now, can’t you hear me talking to you / Hey now, I thought I saw you this afternoon / Oh well, things get a little bit harder to say as the time goes by.” I almost expected the next line to be “Oh well, whatever, never mind.” But moving forward, the song becomes more of an anthem for self-reliance and rebirth: “I don’t wanna be anything but me / No I don’t wanna see anything that’s not free.”
Though not especially active, the vocal melodies play off nicely against the background wall of rock sound. There’s no real difference between verse and chorus, just different levels of volume and subtle differences in the playing. The track ends with a cool psychedelic lead guitar melody that’s matched by the keyboards (would have liked to hear more of this earlier), and when the song fades out you can hear the overload in the hissing of the amps. They play loud!
Would love to know more about these guys along with whatever’s coming in the future, but for now we have this killer track that’s totally worth a listen!
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