Remember Sports – Slow Buzz

Memories can be fleeting, but sometimes they can be so tactile that you feel like you can reach out and grab them, only for that vision of the past to disintegrate in your hands. There's a lot of looking back in Remember Sports’ Slow Buzz, the third album from the Philadelphia via Ohio trio, and the first with their new moniker. Nostalgia is right there in the name – the band that were once SPORTS have prefixed that with ‘Remember’ – and, on many of these songs, singer and lyricist Carmen Perry remembers someone from a past life and tries to cling to them.

There’s a sense of looking back musically too. The sweet melodies are scuzzed up by lo-fi grunge riffs and some frantic drumming from new member Connor Perry. Side B highlight Temporary Tattoo seems lackadaisical, with more than a hint of Courtney Barnett’s laid-back drawl in Carmen’s delivery, but it’s laced with fierce barbs to a partner who won’t give as much as they take.

But Slow Buzz hits hardest in its directness. The angst and pain is always directed at you. And come the album’s end, there’s not necessarily a sense of understanding or moving on, but there is acceptance of the reality that the relationship at the centre of the record is never coming back, and perhaps that’s fine: 'I’m not going back, you’re not coming back / When you were the one and I wasn’t okay / And if you’re not the one and I’m still not okay / Then there’s no going back.'

Luckily, Remember Sports no longer have to look back on what came before – with this assured arrival they’re definitely moving on to pastures new.

Listen to: Up From Below, You Can Have Alonetime When You’re Dead, No Going Back