Bad Sports, “Sinking You”

I don’t have a lot to say about Jay Reatard’s passing. He was a complete stranger who’s music I loved. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but push/shove probably my all-time sweet spot is the garage/punk/power-pop axis. My favorite band is the Ramones. My favorite album in college was Guitar Romantic. And, yeah, Blood Visions was an obsession for me. I’m in the dude’s fanclub for fuck’s sake.

That he publicly dissed my band was neither here nor there — a stunt is a stunt, and it was pretty transparent. That he wrote us on Myspace to explain that A) “Funny as it sounds,” he thought our “jams are pretty swell” and B) “The internet doesn’t get [his] nonsense of humor” was nice and, well, pretty funny. Ultimately though, I wouldn’t have cared either way, I just loved finding someone who’s talents so perfectly dovetailed with my taste.

Obviously, punk in 2010 is a bit of a formalist exercise. We’ve heard the 1-4-5 chord progression, the aggro sneers, the chunky distortion. But when a band nails sweet-punk, that kind of almost-bubblegum that sounds like it’s played in a trashcan, I get knock-kneed. Records like these shouldn’t be so hard to come by. With any genre that’s become a bit rote, songs are king. And man does Bad Sports have ‘em.

To make a (way too long) story short: If you like Jay Reatard, the Exploding Hearts, the Boys, melodic punk music, pretty much anything on In the Red… get Bad Sports. Trust me.