“Condensation” – Sports Team

So here we’re back to a standard backbeat (see previous review for context)–although maybe not quite. The emphasis is on the two and the four, the very definition of a backbeat, but at the same time the beat also manages, somehow, to swing. I think this has to do with the way lead vocalist Alex Rice toys with the melody, regularly hitting his marks ever so slightly ahead of the actual beat. (Don’t try this at home; it’s harder to do than it seems.) Consider it part of the song’s sloppy-tight vibe–just like the lyrics themselves, in the verse, which spill out in something of a stream and yet, if you pay attention, scan perfectly with the energetic melody.

Somewhat unusually, Sports Team is a six-person band, and everyone is surely doing something here, in service of the crowd-friendly ambiance, although it’s difficult to know who’s doing what when. There are melodic leaps, horn charts, gang-style backing vocals, keyboard glissandos, you name it. (There’s even a reference to “fingertips,” which I can’t help hearing.) Enough is happening such that we only get the verse melody twice, as the song’s busy construction provides us with what sounds like not only a pre-chorus and a chorus but, potentially, either a two-part post-chorus (is that even a thing?) or a post-chorus and a bridge. We can leave the structural analysis to more exacting minds than mine; I’ll take the welcoming beat and agile melodicism and be quite happy.

Based in London, Sports Team was founded in 2016, when five of the six bandmates were studying at Cambridge University. “Condensation” is a track from their forthcoming third album, Boys These Days, slated to arrive in February.