More about: Sports Team

I assume many of our readers will be familiar with The Inbetweeners, the show that gave us soundtracks comprised of the Bands Of The Time (your Kooks, your Maccabees, your Wombats etc) overlaid with protagonist Will’s narration of whatever the gang were up to that day. Essentially, clanging guitars and jaunty beats had become synonymous with the bawdy comedy in a way that was actually quite ahead of the time in 2008, considering how (in the Stranger Things era of TV) music has a renewed sense of importance.

On the other hand, this does have negative consequences. Sports Team, for example. They are the answer to the question: “what if a band based their entire career off The Inbetweeners soundtrack?”. It may seem an uncouth and perhaps lazy remark, but I am at the point where I cannot hear an intro to one of their tracks without the spectre of Simon Bird’s voice in my head commenting about Jay being late for work experience. 

If you were a fan of Sports Team’s Mercury nominated debut album Deep Down Happy, then you’ll undoubtedly like Gulp!, their sophomore effort. Generously, it contains the same spritely and energetic songwriting as before. Not so generously, you do find yourself listening to almost exactly the same album. It’s quite astounding how little there is here to write about: the lack of sustenance and artistic merit would be impressive were it not so depressing. There’s a clear clash of styles between the sprechgesang trend of bands like Yard Act and Dry Cleaning, and the melodic charm of indie heroes Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes, which makes each song feel like a frustrating headache of impulsive indecision. 

Does the album have its moments? Maybe. The album closer ‘Light Industry’ has nice guitar effects, and ‘Dig!’ opens well with a haunting little groove and off-kilter baritone vocals to match it. Is that it? Maybe. The band themselves are perfectly functional, talented musicians — but characterless. Alex Rice’s yelping about middle England was grating by design, and doesn’t get any easier on Gulp!. There’s no dynamic building, no smart contrasts, everything is on, and everything is eternally loud. The riff on ‘Unstuck’ sounds like a tune that your friends at school would hum constantly to annoy you,  ‘Getting Better’ sounds like an AI was told to rewrite ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ from scratch, and ‘The Drop’ sounds like one of Sports Team’s earlier, better singles ‘M5’ but a little more lethargic than before. 

If you want the Sports Team ethos in a song, you can find it in ‘R Entertainment’; there’s no need for creativity, individuality or even basic sustenance in their world, “just a little entertainment”. They have been designed to entertain the masses, and the moshpit moments on Gulp! arrive fully formed and totally forgettable.

Sports Team, and by extension Gulp!, do not know what they want to be, so just settle for the bare minimum and go along with the confidence that it’s enough to fill an album (and career). So if you want an album that is just pure entertainment, something that you can stick in your ears and kill 33 minutes of your life off, you’ll have a distinctly adequate time with Gulp!. But why should you settle for distinctly adequate? Give it a miss and listen to something, anything, else. You could even rewatch The Inbetweeners. That show has a host of great bands on the soundtrack; and thankfully, it ended before Sports Team ever existed. 

Gulp! arrives 26 August via Island Records.

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More about: Sports Team