CD of The Week

Sports Team continue to reinvent themselves, now on their third album, Boys These Days. It came out three months past its original release date, mostly due to time spent on the road and trying to get the record just right. Album #2, Gulp!, took them away from their early spoken indie rock sound, molding them into a guitar-rocking, frantic punkish band like Parquet Courts. But Boys These Days jumps light years into a diversity of upbeat catchiness and repeat listenability, shucking away nearly all of Gulp’s style, save one track. Each song here is a gemstone, refracting a variety of musical genres and exposing some lesser popular influences like Dogs Die in Hot Cars or Squeeze (“Planned Obsolescence”).

Right off the bat, the tongue-in-cheek single, “I’m In Love (Subaru)” reeks of adult contemporary New Wave, like ABC’s “When Smokey Sings” or later period English Beat. It’s a modern, sensible take on the muscle car sexual metaphor of a song like “Little Red Corvette.”  “Head to Space,” is commentary on the affluent’s possible ability to flee Earth in the midst of climate crisis, complete with space command dialogue, by throwing a Dexy’s Midnight Runners jig into an organ freakout. And in the bank-robber-with-a-conscience track “Bonnie,” the band plays with a sinister echo, beat and brass, akin to The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” with guitars by Cake.

The album plays with wit and critique with an evolving life. The pub disco title track “Boys These Days” reminds us that history repeats itself, where the chorus of “boys these days look like girls” is a bit of weaponized nostalgia passed down generation by generation like great-grandma’s fine China. Sports Team grew up hearing parents waxing about not having doors, playing in traffic with rocks, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and not having time for fun…perhaps that’s why the song is delivered in a Huey Lewis / J Geils Band package. And the final sedated, orchestral track, “Maybe When We’re Thirty,” looks at those parental fables and wonders if they too will desire to own a dog and take a night out once a year to see The War on Drugs someday.

Sports Team have done a lot of growing up recently, although they are not yet 30. Singer Alex Rice recently became a first-time father. And while on their U.S. tour last December, the band was held up at gunpoint on night one. A very coincidental situation, as they were about to release the Western-stylized single “Bang Bang Bang,” which is a spot-on takedown of American culture (fancy IPAs, Sea World, Mickey Mouse, IHOP, sun tans, AR-15) and its obsession with guns (“He don’t get hard / unless he takes gun to bed”).  It is anxiously delivered, portraying American short fuse intensity in ridiculous fashion (I would have said exaggerated fashion, but sadly, I don’t think it’s all that exaggerated).

But Sports Team really hit a home run when they are pouring on their swaggering, confident blue-eyed soul. They picked up and ran with the sound of Gulp!’s “Getting Better” with the back-to-back pub-pop singles “Condensation” and “Sensible.” Both tracks are energetic toe-tapping struts with banging hooks that plug right into the brain’s pleasure center. They’ll be opening for Supergrass this fall, and although there are no Philly dates (yet, fingers crossed), New York is set to host them on September 11th.