QR Music Review: Everyone's Invited - Sports

Everyone’s Invited is arguably the weakest release yet from the Oklahoma dream pop veterans, but nonetheless provides fans with a fresh supplement of the band’s dreamy, nostalgic sound, with new ground being broken to show that Sports are taking tentative steps out of their comfort zone.                                                                                        

 Bursting onto the scene with the fantastic 2015 debut Naked All the Time, Sports have yet to fully break into the consciousness of the indie mainstream, but in the meantime have built a small cult following with their aforementioned first LP and its 2016 follow-up release, People Can’t Stop Chillin’. On these two albums, Sports amalgamated influences from dream pop and psychedelia with the synth-heavy sound of 1980s pop music. Their latest release, Everyone’s Invited, takes this latter sound and runs with it, resulting in an incredibly nostalgic (but at times slightly forgettable) sounding record. Despite this, Everyone’s Invited is Sports’ most ambitious release yet, with a total of twelve tracks (compared to seven and eight on previous albums) and even a feature from obscure Atlanta rapper KeithCharles, one of the high points of the album and evidence that the band are making tentative attempts to stretch their creative muscles.                                                                                  

On the surface, Everyone’s Invited is exactly what this reviewer expected from a new Sports release; jaunty, carefree, and often downright fun indie synthpop. Drawing inspiration from Phil Collins and Hall & Oates, Cale Chronister’s vocals, often buried deep under layers of fuzz and feedback, remain distinctly his own and he employs an impressive range, on occasion even drifting towards the cheesy pop falsetto of ELO’s Jeff Lynne. Musically, Everyone’s Invited encroaches on the dreamy R&B sound of indie contemporaries HOMESHAKE and Mild High Club, although the heavily processed synths here are much closer to the Vaporwave aesthetic movement that came and went in recent years.                                                    

 In spite of the band’s capabilities, Everyone’s Invited is a bit of a mixed bag; songs like ‘Never Fall In Love’ ooze the brightly coloured, gaudy aesthetic of the ‘80s, and would sound at home on an early Nintendo games console. ‘Shiggy’ is another standout track, with featured artist KeithCharles’s echoing, distant rap verse bringing the song to an ethereal climax. ‘No Pressure’ could soundtrack any number of forgotten American high-school romcom B-movies, in the best way possible – its melancholy instrumentation and lyrics dealing with innocent love and loss are textbook ‘80s cheesiness.

 And while these tracks are not the only ones worth listening to on the album (‘Autopilot’ is also worth checking out, simply due to its grooviness), much of Everyone’s Invited seems like filler, which hinders the album as a whole  In contrast to the album’s highs, songs such as ‘Don’t Tell Me’, ‘We Should Get Married’, and ‘Levitate’ could easily be found on any other Sports album, or any other modern dream pop album for that matter, and often sound like nothing more than the backing for some mundane Tears For Fears album track. ‘Rob Las Vegas’, featuring banal allusions to Elvis, and ‘Palaver’, a Wild West-inspired interlude with Jonny Cash-esque vocals, are not particularly awful songs in and of themselves, but feel as though they’ve been shoehorned in at the last minute and mar the overall pace of the album. This is perhaps the biggest disappointment regarding the album; while none of the songs are especially bad, the differences between the strongest tracks and the weakest is particularly jarring, especially when the band’s previous efforts were a pleasure to listen to from start to finish.                   

Everyone’s Invited holds its own among Sports’ discography, with some of the more enjoyable tracks on the album rivalling cuts from Naked All The Time and giving fans something to look forward to on future albums with the band’s increasing experimentation on their established sound. However, the album’s cohesiveness is let down by a handful of easily skipped throwaway songs here and there. As for the songs that don’t fall into either of these categories – if you want to hear Sports do what they do best, cut the fat from Everyone’s Invited and round off your listening with Naked All The Time.

By Luke Dodds