Bad Sports – Kings of the Weekend!

I saw these guys live maybe six months ago – a three-piece that played their guts out, traded vocals occasionally, were solid and confident, and sounded very good. Sure, it was heavily derivative of theRamones, but it’s not like that’s anything new. Besides, Bad Sports were good at it, which is all that’s required, right?

The weird thing is, the Bad Sports I hear on Kings of the Weekend! sound virtually nothing like I remember Bad Sports sounding live. They sound almost like two different bands, and it makes me wonder exactly how much I drank that night, you know?

Recorded by Mark Ryan (the mastermind of a million bands you probably like – or at least have heard of – Marked Men, High Tension Wires and Mind Spiders among them), there’s a surprisingly muddy, distracting quality to the music here that really takes a lot of the band’s energy away. I was expecting bright, slashing guitar lines, but with Ryan behind the controls, everything is a little fuzzed-out and buried, almost giving the songs a swamp-like vibe. Where I remember as a fun, wire-tight three-piece that played excellent Ramones-inspired punk that abounded with energy, this seems pretty different. Songs like “Teenage Girls” has an odd, almost 50s-esque undercurrent to it, reminding me of a less ferocious outing by the Tranzmitors or something. The familiar melodies the Ramones used as a template are most certainly there, but they seem seriously weighted down by the odd production values. Midway through the album Bad Sports step up the tempo a bit – “I’m In Love (With Myself)” is an upbeat, rock-simple clusterbomb of a song that could’ve come out on Stiff thirty-five years ago, and the follow-up “Get Your Head” is no slouch either – but as whole, it’s a somewhat muddied affair.

Kings of the Weekend! isn’t terrible by any stretch, and they close it out with the ringing klaxon call of “Days Of Denton”, but their slower numbers frequently become lost in the murk, and the muddiness of the recording diminishes the potential impact of the faster songs. It’s just a preference, I guess: Mark Ryan clearly knows what he’s doing, and so does the band – I just feel that songs like these should be bright, crystalline bursts of sound. On Kings of The Weekend!, they seem mired and bogged down by their own weight.