Music fans who immediately dismiss anything sports related as merely the daft obsessions of loutish neanderthals would be doing themselves a disservice by ignoring Sports, the potent debut record from the San Francisco noise-rock trio Weekend. It’s a real bulldozer of an album, filled with crushing, heavily-distorted guitar waves that are as relentless as they are resounding. The songs are sonic squalls of intensity that never quite let the listener get their bearings until the brief “quieter” moments, which turn out to be nothing more than mere tonal psych-jobs that tempt you to turn up the volume before the wall of sound crashes into you once more.



The record begins with the tempestuous urgency of ‘Coma Summer,’ a legitimate Song Of The Year candidate that never lets up on the all-consuming din over its stormy six and a half minutes. There is melody buried deep within the noisy maelstrom that dominates this track, but looking for a pleasing, identifiable strain of music within this racket is missing the point entirely, like looking down for your house below you as you’re carried away by a tornado. It’s best in these instances to just get swept away by the tempest and try and survive the experience without suffering too much damage, hearing or otherwise.



The album only builds on that aggressive initial show of force without ever easing up on the discord, as ‘Youth Haunts,’ ‘Monongah, WV’ and ‘End Times’ all bristle with a fierce tension that never truly breaks. The appropriately named ‘Monday Morning’ provides a brief respite from the fury found on the rest of the record, coming across more as a tranquil segue into the darker eruptions of sound that follow than a stand alone song in its own right; akin to Mondays typically serving as the day of the week most of us choose to forget about as we work towards the, *ahem,* weekend.



The Jesus and Mary Chain, Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine influences are easily identifiable and threaded throughout Sports, but there are also clear hints of modern artists in the ruckus as well, with the threadbare anxiety of ‘Landscape’ echoing Women, while ‘Age Class’ alludes to early-90s era Sonic Youth. It all adds up to a turbulent mix of distortion and edgy agitation that is unceasing and utterly immense, it’s one of the years most pleasant musical surprises, no matter how brutally dissonant Weekend’s sound may be.