Sports Team @ Petit Campus▪

At first glance, Sports Team look like an amalgam of the last 30 years of Brit Pop. Frontman Alex Rice has Tim Burgess dance moves and Liam Gallagher mic posture. Drummer Al Greenwood sports a Fred Perry track jacket, the kinda vibe you got from Arctic Monkeys back when they were still fun. Keyboardist Ben Mack stands in toque, ski shades, and scarf, almost motionless for the entire set; picture a catatonic Bez. Rhythm guitarist/vocalist Rob Knaggs has the kinda soft-boy centre parting that was so cool in the 90s (and weirdly, has gotten super cool again), while lead guitarist Henry Young has the scruffy-haired bonnet that was popular right in between. Bottle-blond bassist Oli Dewdney rocks the kinda polo that takes you back to Hard-Fi. It’s truly a nostalgia trip just looking at them!

Sports Team are most certainly not your typical garage rock band, though. While surface skims across their Spotify playlist certainly lend more than a nod to the lo-fi garage rock era, there is unquestionably more to them when you dig a little deeper. We get to witness that first hand on this, their debut Montreal show.

The set blazes out of the blocks with a frantic Here It Comes Again, while The Game follows a similar pace. Around halfway through Happy (God’s Own Country), things start to go exploratory, as the song seems to change structure completely, morphing into a hook that’s absolutely to die for. Al has to lose the Fred Perry track jacket once R Entertainment is done, as things really start to heat up in the room.

Oli’s earthshaking bass intro is the highlight of The Races, while the thunderous coalition it forms with Ben’s twinkly keys on Dig! bears more than a passing resemblance to Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age, albeit a more electronic one.

Frontman Alex seems to relax and enjoy himself more and more as the show progress, too, responding to the rapturous applause at the end of Unstuck by clapping right back to the crowd. After his Cribs-esque spoken vocal intro to Camel Crew, he busts into a campy schoolgirl skip across the stage that draws laughs from all around a busy Petit Campus.

Alex leaves the stage, leaving Rob to be the star of the show on Light Industry, strumming softly on the dimly lit stage while declaring, “they’ve had enough of Benny and the Jets”, before Alex returns for M5.

After Alex pays homage to the Great White North (“this is our last night in Canada, it’s been unbelievable!”), The Drop finally lights the touch paper for a group of lads who have been threatening to go nuts for a few songs now, and they duly start bouncing around the floor as Alex and Rob share vocal duties on arguably the band’s signature tune to date. It’s a pummelling indie anthem and quite the contrast to some of the punkier moments that came before, and which indeed come again immediately after on Here’s The Thing, a comedic rebuttal to various contemporary misconceptions (“if you just work a little harder you’ll get by / you can trust a man who wears a suit and tie / it’s all just lies, lies, lies!”). The equally hilarious Ashton Kutcher and Stanton close out the set in furious fashion.

Judging by the setlist I can see on the stage, it doesn’t seem like an encore is planned. However, despite having crossed out Fishing from the middle of the set, the band return and Alex exclaims, “cheers for the encore, OK, we’ll do Fishing!” They do, and the floor heaves once more, and each time the song breaks down for the chorus, the singalong that accompanies Alex’s plan to be “going fishing” is ear-splitting. It’s a perfect way to round off a blistering 55 minutes and an epic Montreal debut for Sports Team.