Sports Team mature with sophomore effort ‘Gulp!’
English rockers Sports Team have returned with their hotly anticipated sophomore album Gulp!. A much more refined body of work than their 2020 debut Deep Down Happy, it sees the band grapple with more mature themes than their detractors would expect, pushing their boundaries musically and production-wise.
As is expected, there are memorable and forgettable moments, but one thing is certain, Sports Team aren’t going anywhere just yet, with the self-awareness of Gulp! a welcome aspect. In fact, it might just be their making, a project that helps to reset their course.
“You see so many narratives every day,” says guitarist Rob Knaggs in the press materials. “You wake up, see a video about The Oscars and then you go on The Guardian and read about Ukraine and then you go on Instagram and see someone’s dog and someone’s birthday and it’s Mothers’ Day. There are endless clashing images and at some point it just becomes like a weird background noise to your life.”
Although the band might claim that they have moved away from their early influences of 1990s alt-rock, such as Pavement and the surreal social commentaries of Pulp, they’ve not gone anywhere; they’ve just been repurposed. In fact, there’s still a defining Britpop influence coursing through the record, with tracks such as ‘Dig’ channelling flecks of Elastica and ‘The Drop’ that of Blur — this isn’t a criticism though. For the most part, Sports Team make the raw materials their own.
There are also dominant hues of middle England’s favourite band, XTC, with the band doing their best Andy Partridge impression on pieces such as ‘Kool Aid’ and ‘Entertainment’. As for the permanence of Pavement within the band’s sound, look no further than ‘Unstuck’.
The album starts off strongly with the thunderous cut ‘The Game’, and it is carried by frontman Alex Rice’s performance, which is his most rousing to date. He sings: “Oh yeah, that’s the game, life’s hard, but I can’t complain”, in what is a sharp take on the problems and confusion of modern existence that Knaggs discussed. It then segues into the single ‘Dig’, which blends the recently out-of-date obsession with post-punk with the love of Britpop that many of the indie sleaze bands of the noughties would be proud of.
Followed by ‘The Drop’, the opening three tracks of the album are strong, but it soon tails off into what is more of the same, with it hard to distinguish between many of the album’s middle tracks thanks to similar rhythms, dynamics and instrumentation. I fear these are the areas that Sports Team might come unstuck in the future, but for now, fans can rejoice as they’ve definitely re-energised their formula.
Despite the criticisms that can be fired at Gulp!, the closing track ‘Light Industry’ is a great way to finish the album. The keyboard sound is nothing but nostalgic and is plucked straight from the oeuvre of Stereolab. It is a welcome stylistic shift, even if it is minor. From the guitar sound to the dynamics, it’s a genuinely refreshing moment, with the band aptly closing the book on their second record with another piece of sharp social commentary.
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