ALBUM REVIEW: Sports Team – ‘Boys These Days’

Of the handful of templates for new post-punk bands, Sports Team’s has proven to be the most popular, likely because it’s the most reliable. With it, you don’t need to be a bruiser like IDLES, or capable of even the most minute hint of deconstruction to keep pace with Fontaines D.C.. You just have to be rubbery, wry and pop-minded, and chances are good that you’ll see some results. You don’t even need to have that good a singer half the time! Who cares if the style is now threadbare from overuse, to where even its nominal pioneers are now moving on, when it’s an easy foot in the door?

So, to a degree, Sports Team are patient zero for any current apathy around UK post-punk, as well as being victims of their own influence. Surely they never expected to need the re-up that Boys These Days presents, a consequence of being run out of house and home by genre newcomers beneath them. It’s also not like they were doing badly in terms of momentum, either. 2022’s Gulp! was a rare sophomore hit for an indie band, commercially, critically and in quality. You could argue, however, that Sports Team were looking for ways out of post-punk even then, making the proper leap on Boys These Days. Now, their Middle English witticisms play far closer to the ‘Middle English’ portion of that descriptor, as you might expect on an album that sees fit to sample the Coronation Street opening.

How appropriate that is, then, for an album with a predominant musical impetus that appears to be classic British TV themes. The title track definitely has a bit of Only Fools And Horses about it; same with Condensation, in which that same sound undergoes a rearrange to seem less recognisable but still not impossible to pin. It’s actually quite endearing the way that Sports Team so proudly wear this unfashionable form of themselves, a far cry from a thrust-upon role as trendsetters. In this light, they might even seem more comfortable. Alex Rice’s voice already had a streak of slipping into mad sonic gesticulation, and leaning on peritextual ‘comedy’ suits his abilities rather nicely.

Moreover, it opens up avenues to touch on some additional musical ‘opulence’, for however much that’s worth. The quotation marks there are absolutely necessary, because it’s not so much grandeur as a wider palette to tie the sound together. Strings, piano trills and saxophones are meant as tasteful window-dressing instead of air-stealing centrepieces, which leaves the album feeling a bit small, overall. Not that that’s the sole reason; there isn’t as much of a core of strength to this as Sports Team are likely counting on. It’s what you get when the tone of TV jingles is draped all over your work, and produced in similarly inoffensive stead. The chintziness definitely comes with the territory and, to Sports Team’s marginal credit, no one in a similar space can avoid it. Still, clean-ups can be made—Head To Space, if its metallic vocal mix wasn’t bad enough, carries this irritatingly small melody that squeezes and jingles with no intensity whatsoever, but hits just the right frequency to drill itself in incessantly.

The album definitely seems to slip more and more as it progresses, sequenced as almost a perfect downward incline. At the top is I’m In Love (Subaru), which might be an obvious sophisti-pop swing that finds Rice smoothening out his vocal direction for a Tony Hadley or Martin Fry impression, but it clicks into place just as easily as those Spandau Ballet or ABC songs will. Towards the end, though, is the aforementioned Head To Space, and Bonnie’s Britpop lurch that’s almost like a seasick Happy Mondays. And for most of its duration, there’s not a hook that Sports Team put out to reasonably reel you back in. Boys These Days might be a safe album but it also doesn’t appreciate the value of going beyond that. It chooses to be locked in a musical ecosystem, not seeing an immediate need to compete or show up.

Perhaps that’s why a lot of the writing fits in familiar archetypes carried over from post-punk, although it’s good that much of Sports Team’s wryness has been brought over with them. If it hadn’t a song like the title track would feel looser and more impotent, rather than its current POV piss-take of haughty boomers and their reams of complaints about how things are the same. For what it’s offering, the key plus-point is how it’s not totally flat and uneventful. Sensible is the same, a patchwork medley of self-improvement send-ups that’ll occasionally produce a quip with the charm of “Take me to Dunston, we’ll play Fred again.. and dance”. In essence, though, Sports Team haven’t really left the gated community of British viewpoints and buttons to press that housed them in their post-punk days. They’re expressive when relaying them, though that might be the only edge they have when harder, blunter instruments tend to tackle them better. The only outlier is Bang Bang Bang, and even then, it’s a little odd to have a topic so intrinsically American as gun obsession on an album so moulded by its British origins.

And even then, other than the baritone twang of the guitar to beat in its transatlantic intent, it fits in with Boys These Days’ profound lack of surprise. Surprise within itself, that is; for what’s supposed to be a reinvention, Sports Team appear to simply has hopped over from one narrow set of criteria to the other. To be fair, this one’s a bit more flexible, though not in a meaningful way. It’s not stopping the album from getting worn down remarkably quickly, nor does it keep the initial novel charm intact for its duration. Honestly, when you get about half way, it feels like the album has shown all of its tricks, and just carries on to avoid being an even-more-ill-fated EP. At least Sports Team might have avoided the floods of pretenders for the time being, but likely at a hit to their own prospects going forward.

For fans of: Blur, FEET, L’objectif

‘Boys These Days’ by Sports Team is released on 23rd May on Bright Antenna / Distiller Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall