Sports Team, Deep Down Happy
Big Desert Records
We’ve progressed past idolising the ‘cool’, the hipsters who once thought themselves the pinnacle of interest are subject to widespread mockery. We’ve all just realised that anyone who really thinks they’re cool probably isn’t. However, we’ve opened the gates for a far more insidious force – the ostentatiously uncool. Sports Team, in the Guardian interview that shoved their superiority right onto their sleeve, have made themselves the poster children for the ‘I’m better than you because I don’t care for depth’ movement, but their debut album confirms that tongue-in-cheek really only works if you’ve actually got a point to make.
Sports Team as a band, and Deep Down Happy as an album, are both riddled with almost laughable irony. The first instance lies in their disparaging attempt at distancing themselves from guitar music (of course, on the grounds that it’s “not very cool”), when their fanbase consists of a ragtag horde of guitar music fans (though they all definitely consider themselves above it). Deep Down Happy consists musically, fair enough, of a bunch of bangers – jagged guitar riffs and whining countermelodies, mosh-pit fodder to run off to see in a tent when Gerry Cinnamon is on the main stage and you’re too good for that. Plenty of charm, plenty of kick, plenty of nonthreatening jibes at widely denounced upper-middle-classisms.
Sports Team somehow profit both off being political and being apolitical – denouncing IDLES for their outspokenness, their Cambridge graduate status shines through. No, we don’t say Fuck Boris, we’re intellectually above that, instead we choose to engage through easy critique, punk-ish sensibilities appropriated for an empty message. Their riotousness screams punk, but the problem lies in the fact that they seem to know enough fox hunters to find denouncing fox hunting a super relevant message. They seem to be begging for a pat on the back for the fact they aren’t that Tories whilst their strongest appeal is to fans that, once they get through their rebellious Labour phase, will go on to vote the way their parents do and live in the picket-fence houses depicted in Camel Crew.
We run into further obstacles when we delve into Sports Team’s literate superiority. Not only do they spend so much of their lyrical content dissing people who are uncool whilst making it vehemently clear they despise those who do try to be cool so in fact only the pretentiously dishevelled Sports Team may emerge as Coolest Of Them All (quite the conundrum), but their MO undermines them completely. We don’t write high metaphors, it doesn’t have to be Dublin in the rain, it doesn’t have to be complex, frontman Alex Rice gobs off on the regular… Yet Deep Down Happy is riddled with metaphors that aren’t down-to-earth enough to subvert themselves and simultaneously are too vacuous to be worth anything. Just to entertain their intellect for a moment too, let’s talk about Sports Team’s syntax! You can’t pretend you’re not writing ‘high’ when yes, you might be writing about Pritt stick and putting up shelves but when you’re spelling it out as if it’s poetry, you’re slicing through the very point you’re trying to make.
Ok, yes. Deep Down Happy has a few bangers (mainly the singles). But when each track is so hyper-saturated with privilege (which isn’t a problem in itself! It’s the superiority that comes alongside it that’s tone deaf) and self-aggrandisement in disguise, the whole album is rendered inessential. Go and listen to FEET instead – they do everything Sports Team do but with actual substance.
Deep Down Happy is out now.
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