Oh, big whoop. You don’t like
Sports Team? They wind you up by being big, brash and bombastic? They challenge your carefully considered acceptance only of things that show so little fizz or frazzle someone might believe you cool through a lack of personality alone? Forgotten how to have fun, have we? Sucks to be you, you absolute fucking bore.
The battle lines were long ago drawn on indie’s Marmite marauders, but here’s the thing (sorry - Ed), ‘
Gulp!’ is absolute proof that, for those not so tired of life they’ve given up, Sports Team are a band built without a brake pedal. Is it a perfect album? No. Should it be? Also, absolutely not. That would totally defeat the point.
Rattling through at pace, never making perfect the enemy of the good, their second full-length is proof of a band perpetually in motion. The development from debut album ‘
Deep Down Happy’ is obvious. Opener ‘
The Game’ shows perma-baiting frontman Alex Rice at his ramshackle, Grating-est Showman best. Crackling up against the spitting gobs and smoking ears of the mob, you can almost hear him furiously gyrating like any pause for thought would result in instant death. ‘
Dig!’ is a weird, wandering groove - the kind of earworm that comes out of nowhere - while ‘
Cool It Kid’, featuring Sorry’s Asha Lorenz, hits with a lilting, treacle-thick gloop.
