Our first “Album of the Month” for this new academic year is the fantastic Gulp! by new indie darlings Sports Team.
Here’s a snippet from our contributor Thomas Cather’s review of the album:
Upon first listening, I found myself skipping back to their debut EP ‘Winter Nets’ just to double check that it was the same infamous voice of frontman Alex Rice spearheading the tracks. Since the release of that iconic middle-English soundtrack in 2018, the band and its members have grown a lot (if only the same could be said about their fans). Their endless touring travels on the motorways of the UK, from city to city and, more recently, across the pond to New York, has seen their style become increasingly distant from the themes of their past.
Where ‘Winter Nets’, ‘Keep Walking’, and even ‘Deep Down Happy’ represent the angst of being a young person in a small English town, ‘Gulp!’ instead illustrates the band’s explosion out of their village life, local band cocoon. Sports Team make their many influences even clearer in this LP, with a wide variety of sounds spanning multiple eras of rock.
In the build-up to the release of ‘R Entertainment’, frontman Alex Rice tweeted that the band are entering their ‘U2 Vertigo phase’, exemplified perfectly by tracks like ‘The Drop’ and ‘Kool Aid’. This stands in stark contrast, however, with the very bouncy, American country sounding ‘Unstuck’, which has more in common with Dolly Parton than with Bono. It’s testament to the band’s expert coordination and character that through these dramatic shifts, they retain the essence of what makes them Sports Team. They blend their Post-Punk Lite style into each genre they cover, keeping their tracks distinctly moshable.
Thomas’ full review of the album can be found here.
