Sports Team - Deep Down Happy

The Guardian 80

(Island)
This six-piece band marry Britpop sensibilities with a US alt-rock sound

With an eloquence you’d hope for from a band made up of Cambridge graduates and an old-school penchant for slagging off their indie peers, London-based six-piece Sports Team have long given good interview. Pleasingly, their debut album suggests there’s enough musical substance to back up their fighting talk. Sharply observational lyrics skewering the mores of suburbia and middle England inevitably evoke the less boorish end of the Britpop spectrum. But where the Pulp and Blur of that era always sounded quintessentially British, Deep Down Happy more often takes its musical cues from US alt-rock, most notably the off-kilter melodies of Pavement and the boisterousness of Parquet Courts.

Opener Lander sets the tone, Rob Knaggs’s ever-shifting guitar lines supporting frontman Alex Rice’s Sprechgesang stream-of-consciousness (“I wanna be a lawyer/ Or someone who hunts foxes”). Going Soft, meanwhile, struts like Franz Ferdinand in their mid-00s pomp, while Fishing just sounds uncomplicatedly joyful. They don’t manage to sustain the invention throughout the 12 songs: The portrait of an opinionated older man in The Races relies too heavily on stereotype and comes across like the final iteration in a series of progressively worse photocopies of Blur’s Charmless Man. Meanwhile, referencing Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s marriage (on Kutcher) has little to say about the world today.