Slow Buzz＜Colored Vinyl＞

Following their second album, 2015's All of Something, the band SPORTS moved their base from the college town of Gambier, Ohio to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, repurposed or replaced a couple of members, and rebranded as Remember Sports. What remains intact on their third LP, 2018's Slow Buzz, is singer and main songwriter Carmen Perry's intimate snapshots of emotional bliss and baggage, and the band's loose, lively, '90s-influenced sound. Inspired by mourning the end of a relationship, it picks up where they left off in terms of sound, then dials up the intensity a notch. Having said that, the album opens with humming, atmospheric keys and drum machine on "Otherwise," before stage diving into punky guitar pop and relationship strife midway through the song. Later, in the anxiety-laden "You Can Have Alonetime When You're Dead," she remembers something her partner once said, alongside likewise churning electric guitars, siren-like wails, and relentless crash cymbals. Elsewhere, the bouncy, blistering "Temporary Tattoo" takes a couple of breaths for a few bars of drumstick clicks and harmonic guitar before returning to guitar distortion and full drums. While even the noisier songs are always commanded by melody, the melody takes flight on the more restrained, ambling "No Going Back," an album highlight that concludes "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." That kind of unrefined lyric captures the exasperation of Slow Buzz as whole, an album that delivers on catharsis and catchiness. ~ Marcy Donelson