Indie-pop hit-makers Cale and Christian form the American duo Sports: masters of the motto simple, but effective. Their music is exactly that, capitalising on the reliability of a few synth notes and some expert, poppy melodies to deliver a replayable and commercial touchdown. Despite this, they've yet to have much of a cultural footprint. Millions of listeners everywhere, certainly enough to fill stadiums, but nothing much about the Sports grooves seems to permeate the discourse. They don't even have a Wikipedia page —unless the humourously generic name born from wanting to make money in the sports industry is burying them below the tides —and little is known about the duo beyond the surface level.
Disregarding the pretty significant streaming numbers, their latest self-titled, self-produced release Sports has fallen on dead air, with a four-year, deafening silence between releases not helping their impact. It's a bit of a shame, then, that this album has failed to travel by ear despite muling so many earworms, and an undeniable kineticism worthy of your time. While certainly not the most varied or technically impressive effort, even just one play of a suave single will have you humming it for hours, and that is praise enough.
Sports' latest plays best as a grab bag. Plucking out a song or three for use on the dancefloor or in your latest playlist brings with it the album's latent potential, which is, ironically, acting as atomic. As a complete, forty-minute package, the songs start to homogenise and blur into one another, obfuscating the pop power of each dormant hit when heard in a vacuum.
But giving the songs that isolation unveils the magic. Cale and Christian seem to recognise this, too, in bestowing upon their listeners an album that feels more like a collage of two-minute laps ready to be clipped and shipped, recontextualised as social media anthems. Tracks like 'Nice 2 Meet Myself (Bang Bang Bang)' deploy a devilishly infectious melody that a synth-pop fan couldn't escape from if they tried. The opener 'Gravestone' is positioned almost as bait, reeling listeners in with a slow build that ensnares them in the endless chorus of the album by the time it hits.
Each one of these outputs plays excellently as a single but looks common and uninteresting in adjacency to the rest of the tracklist. To that extent, Sports have failed to deliver a good, cohesive, consistent album, but settled on distilling the magic another way, and through a methodology which likely aligns better with their target audience.
Playlist-worthy indietronica nods back at clear inspirations such as MGMT and arrives every step of the way, from the funk-driven 'Keep Falling in Love' and its addictive titular hook, or perhaps in the anomalously downtempo crowd favourite 'Drama King', which features processed vocals building to a delightfully effective if ephemeral chorus. There's nothing truly marvellous on display here, but the music is sure to be a fun backdrop to a dusk-lit joyride or night out despite the sonic, trending typicalities.
Strangely, though, the album finds itself getting better the more it dares to defy its patterns. Penultimate track 'I Can't Cry' ends up mysteriously running almost twice as long as every other track at nearly six minutes, and is undoubtedly all the better for it, ebbing through balladic verses into an explosion of voltaic energy.
Not only that, but this longform outlier brings a further shift in the back-half, completely disembarking from the consistency set by its front. While every other song relies heavily on its forward momentum to amplify a final chorus, 'I Can't Cry' instead makes a new chorus altogether, suavely manoeuvring through the repeated "you're hurting my feelings, talking about the future without me there" as the needles of kaleidoscopic synth drop like rain slamming into the dancefloor.
Sports' return from the shadows is a record that really struggles to be a record at all. It feels like a constant battle of similarities when navigating the tracklist, but a sure-fire three-minute thrill ride through some masterful indie-pop grooves if the songs find themselves isolated. Sports' biggest flaw is simultaneously an endogenous crisis of the modern album while also indicating their inability to make meaningful variations.
But is that really an issue? Maybe the album's biggest strength is also its greatest flaw: the present, digitised rendition of the album is made malleable enough to be deconstructed to serve any need, and casting off these musical appendages into biomes of their own is a guaranteed way of finding your next earworm, or the kind of thing you'll subconsciously pray the shuffle feature takes you to. It would be great for Sports to make something that feels better suited as a cohesive piece, but it's also acceptable for them to play the hits, and do what they clearly do best.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6WJ2hKMecjy6AcOanyIBgt?si=AIaCI08YTEiNZWwq5EiVeg
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