Jangle and fizz grows out of a friendship
Sportsfan’s breakout year just might be upon us
What’s the deal? While Toronto quartet Sportsfan has yet to attain that level of “buzz,” where its name is dropped constantly in local scenester circles, it has been turning up on prominent bills about town with increasing regularity for the past year or so, so you know that people “in the know” already — oh, what’s the word? — know something’s brewin’.
And something’s brewin’, all right. All I know, personally, is that Sportsfan’s punkish power-pop, blessed as it is with the petulant, but dryly selfaware lyrical personality and commanding voice of frontwoman Ali Haberstroh — who bites like the young Chrissie Hynde or Rainer Maria’s Caithlin De Marrais in her more barbed moods, but can also rock a wounded croak reminiscent of Cat Power or Julien Baker when she’s feelin’ down — is already operating at too refined a level after little more than two years of being a somewhat-serious band pursuit to escape wider notice for too much longer.
Beyond that, I’ve few biographical details to share about Sportsfan, other than that nimble guitarist Simon Outhit is a nice chap and a Nova Scotia expat who occasionally bartends at the end of my street and who, I suspect, might have soaked up a little grunge-era-Halifax pep and sparkle from watching his auntie Alison front the gone-but-never-forgotten East Coast trio Rebecca West during the mid-’90s.
Close your eyes to geography, anyway, and it’s easy to imagine Haber- stroh’s jangleriffic love letter to a certain Toronto Blue Jays starter named “Stroman” or the spry fizz of “Eddie Vedder” or even Sportsfan’s 2016 bid for a holiday evergreen, “It’s Not That Cool to Not Like Christmas,” being beamed in from the same pre-millennial Hali-pop heyday that gifted the world with Sloan, Thrush Hermit and the Super Friendz. You could probably slide a Sportsfan EP or two into the mix with your Alvvays and Mo Kenney records and no one would complain, either. Just sayin’.
Speaking of Sportsfan EPs, 2016’s Bad Summer and 2017’s Holy Hell have now been combined into one uber- EP package on “Coke-bottle green” vinyl to be released next Fri- day entitled Extended Plays. All pretty easy to get into, you’ll find.
Sum up what you do in a few simple sentences. “We started making music together because we were in that honeymoon period of friendship where you just want to be around each other all the time so being in a band seemed like a perfect excuse to do that,” Haberstroh says. “Mostly we just love each other and rock-’n’-roll and beer and making pre-written jokes that we try to pull off as natural stage banter — and it’s buckwild to think that if you work really, really, really, really hard, loving all those things can become your job one day if you’re lucky. We don’t see any better incentive to keep the honeymoon goin’ than that.”
What’s a song I need to hear right now? “Gabriel.” Walks the line between “bristling” and “bittersweet” in a mildly ooey-gooey manner quite satisfyingly representative of Sportsfan’s burgeoning gifts. Infinite bonus points, too, for the spot-on quotation from Joy Division’s “No Love Lost” in the intro.
Where can I see them play? At the Smiling Buddha next Friday, with B-17, Triples and Beach Boys cover band the Beachmen “to end the night.”