Sallie Ford – Slap Back (ALBUM REVIEW)

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salliefordslapSallie Ford is the ultimate garage rock dream girl, maintaining her effortless badassness and sexy demeanor with every note she sings. Her voice is soulful and quivering, but strong and full-bodied. On her first record without her beloved band the Sound Outside, Ford is joined by a killer all-woman band she assembled as part of a long-standing desire to pay literal homage to the girl groups she holds so dear. And what resulted ain’t your mama’s Sallie Ford record. Slap Back features band mates Cristina Cano (keys), Anita Lee Elliott (bass), and Amanda Spring (drums), with Ford on lead guitar, and it’s a hearty slice of feminist rock and roll for which you may not have realized you’d had a hankering.

Ford and her band show intense appreciation for girl groups spanning decades, from the doo-wop fifties, to the mod sixties, to the punk rock seventies, the electro eighties, and the garage grunge nineties. There’s a little of everything on Slap Back, and Ford does it all to a T. It’s as if she’s been waiting to let these parts of herself run free for a while, and it feels so natural to finally be hearing it.

That quintessential knack for capturing the accessible female perspective on love and heartbreak is still there, and in some cases, stronger than ever. Ford just gets women, and she knows how to share a story through a song, becoming instantly relatable. Her songs are often so diaristic, it’s like they came directly from our psyches.

The psychedelic trippiness of “An Ending” is hypnotic and sweetly sad, while the surf pop gem “Hey Girl” is so damn cute it hurts. “Life is messed up/but I’ll be your coffee/if you’ll be my cup,” Ford sings in an ode to female friendship. “Coulda Been” is a classic wrong place-wrong time story of a failed relationship. Ford always gets these musings so right, and this is no exception. “I coulda been yours/You coulda been mine/But we didn’t want it/At the same time/So it goes when you’re young/No one knows when they’re young,” she sings in that oozing voice of hers.

Ford brought in beloved Portland producer Chris Funk, who has worked with the Decembrists and who lent that same detailed, layered sound to Slap Back. Judging by Ford’s own statements about this record, it seems she’s accomplished everything she set out to do. She’s really honed in on her love of female bands and girl groups of yesteryear. She mostly steers clear of the rockabilly style she’s always embodied so well, instead focusing on thrashing, guitar-heavy garage rock (“Oregon”), and catchy pop hooks (“Never Be Lame”).

There are literally no misses on this record. Ford sounds better than ever in this new chapter of hers, and it fits her perfectly. Each song holds its own little surprise, like the spaced-out techno vibes at the beginning of “Let Go” and “Workin’ the Job”. And for a hint of the old Sallie, check out “So Damn Low”, a killer tune for its simplicity, and one that melds her two fully formed worlds together. Ford plays around with her identity, trying each one on and giving us a dynamite snapshot before moving on to the next. “I’m never gonna be who they want,” she sings, and thank goodness for that.

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