The level of self-doubt, anxious mastery, and poetic poverty that Remember Sports puts into a bottle on every record, I mean,
Please let me in / I’m a bug under your skin / Is it so wrong of me to think I'm worth it?
It’s the kind of stuff you wrote on the back of a marble notebook and then hid from your friends, or you accidentally said it out loud and your friends laughed but when they asked you to repeat it you froze up.
They just set all that to melody.
And I want them to grow up. I want them to evolve and find love and life and - while I am confident they aren’t 22 anymore I also don’t get the sense that their development’s been arrested in any way, but I don’t think there are many groups in the post-emo/indie sphere who can make this sound and feel like THIS:
Takes me straight back to one of my all-time favorite lines from
Am I regressing or growing legs? / My pride on the floor like a broken egg
It’s the crayon and sharpie study hall desk art of lyricism. it’s amazing and it only gets you into more detention but it fills the time and gives you a better outlet than your math homework.
The whole new record actually is a more mature version of this. There’s the goofiness that I assume they aren’t outgrowing at this point. The best part about it is - I can confirm, from experience, one doesn’t grow out of this goofiness, but only learns to repress it to socially acceptable levels, and it makes me genuinely happy to see they can still tap into that feeling.
The Refrigerator has a ton of range. I feel like they discovered Pinkerton (there are some great bridges, like the one on “Bug”), a little Tom Petty (strangely, but I thought it on first listen and now I keep thinking Into the Great Wide Open era?) and of course, all the familiar post-Pixies informed emo-rock (the guitar riff/bend on “Thumb”, and - can I get a Digger shoutout - anybody?!)
Nothing happy to be sad here. Just lots of singalongs. They are on an unbroken, epic run of quality output here, and I hope it continues.
Footnotes:
The broken egg line that’s forever in my head is here:
This has to be the best video - babies!:
And, despite its relative immaturity, why isn’t this in every 20-something movie ever?
