Momma deliver their fantastic second album Welcome to My Blue Sky just in time for a whole new Summer of Grunge. Momma’s Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten are longtime friends who met as high school Pavement fans in Southern California, now raise hell in Brooklyn, and cram their guitars full of youthful sex-and-romance pangs along with a mommalode of slacker angst. Jams like “I Want You (Fever)” are for anyone who’s ever heard the chaos in their heart translated into euphoric guitar ruckus.
Momma made a splash with their ace 2022 debut album Household Name, already soaring with confidence, even if they sang about feeling like total basket cases in most other departments. They revel in their Nineties rock obsession, stealing hooks from the Breeders, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. Yet they turn it all into their own heartfelt gems like “Speeding 72,” a summer-crush road-trip anthem with the hook, “You can catch us around listening to ‘Gold Soundz.’” It might have started as their teenage fantasy, but it didn’t take long before they were playing that song in a Brooklyn gig opening for Pavement. (Seeing Friedman and Weingarten share a mischievous grin at that line was a real kick.)
Welcome to My Blue Sky is twice as great — totally brash, always loud, always effusive, and usually funny even when their lives are falling apart, which is constantly. Weingarten (she/her) and Friedman (they/them) blend their wispy voices in Veruca Salt mode, over the whomp of the band. Producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch (he/him) gives it a shoegaze swirl of musical colors, while drummer Preston Fulks (they/them) slams it home. “Ohio All the Time” is a bittersweet but damn-near-perfect guitar vignette about two kids getting lost in the road in the Midwest, trying to figure out if they’re in love, yet neither one brave enough to speak up. “I’m stuck in 22,” Weingarten and Friedman sigh. “Hanging out forever/Summer’s a tattoo/With you.”
All over the album, they drive around and cheat on their hometown honeys and drink too hard and have a blast screwing up their chaotic-enough-already young lives. And when it’s time to finally face up and make tough emotional choices, they decide instead to hit the road and write more great songs about wanting it both ways, which is how it can go when you’re 22.
But there isn’t a half-assed moment on the album. Momma tumble into tunes about breaking a good woman’s heart for a loser who’ll break yours (“Last Kiss”), feeling surprised when you catch yourself having needs (“Stay All Summer”), coming out to your family (“How to Breathe”), or trying desperately to get off the phone with your ex (“Welcome to My Blue Sky”). There’s also “Rodeo,” a moody lament about infidelity, which Weingarten and Friedman say is from the perspective of their former partners. They got their album title from a sign they spotted on a gas station while they were on the road touring with Weezer — if it didn’t happen in real life, it would happen to a character in a Momma song.
All the emotional turbulence comes through loud and clear in their multilayered guitar crunch. “I Want You (Fever)” is a shameless come-on from the cheatin’ side of town (“Let her down, it’ll feel good”), over Cure-style new wave guitar shimmer, until it all explodes in the My Bloody Valentine dream-pop noise tremors of the chorus, with the chant, “Pick up and leave her/I want you, fever.” The love stories run from the scandalous romance of “Let’s tell all our friends that we’re making a mess” to the pride of “I’m fuckin’ up my life” to the confusion of “It’s hard on us and I’m coming to/Wake me up when my secret’s safe with you.” Momma end the album on a down note with “My Old Street,” mourning their parents’ miserable suburban lives. But on Welcome to My Blue Sky, they make getting lost on the highway sound like an irresistible rock & roll romance.
