Remember Sports
The Refrigerator
GET BETTER
Is any chore more humbling than cleaning the refrigerator? Every few weeks, I cringe as I scrape up leftovers that never met the microwave and toss produce that never saw the stove. Philadelphia indie rockers Remember Sports have long documented mundane shames like this; their sophomore record All of Something ended with a song about washing blood out of bedsheets. Their fifth, The Refrigerator, takes many more passes at the humiliating cycles of domesticity: shoes you tie that will come undone, food waste you forget and then—ew—rediscover. “Say that there’s more to life than cleaning up my room,” singer Carmen Perry belts and pleads on the fuzzy single “Bug,” a song in which she steps on a leftover chip from a bowl she ate days earlier.
Cleaning up can be an ordeal, but also an act of self-formation—just like making an album. And so, on The Refrigerator, Remember Sports take stock of everything on the shelves. As the band’s first self-produced project since their debut, it refreshes the catchy, noisy, and increasingly Americana-influenced signature they’ve practiced for more than a decade now. In that time, they’ve gone from recording at their college radio station to using the late Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Somewhere in the routine of writing and releasing songs, they hit a tipping point. Like Ratboys’ breakthrough The Window, Remember Sports’ The Refrigerator feels like a lifetime of growth reaching a critical mass. The prechoruses are just a bit bouncier, the solos are more air-guitar-worthy. The Chaucer quote they put on the album cover captures this hard-to-pin-down quality: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to learne.”
Remember Sports demonstrate their learne-ing of the craft on songs like “Thumb,” one of their hardest-ever rockers, and “Ghost,” a vision built on the squeals of fiddles, the droning of bagpipes, and a killer backbeat. After stretching out on their last record, the band sounds locked in. Perry gives some of the most forceful vocal performances of her career, especially on “Cut Fruit,” which is structured like a purging scream. The track opens on an inhale of feedback, howls with maximal distortion for three verses and two choruses, then exhales more feedback, with Perry panting from the effort. This is her loudest emotional outpouring and her deepest reach into the icebox; she admits to having “Cut fruit in the back of the crisper drawer / It didn’t make sense to buy more”—either because she didn’t really plan to eat it, or she didn’t think she’d be around to do so.
Perry’s lyrics transcend the cycles of daily life by undoing the clichés associated with them. On one verse of “Cut Fruit,” she sings, “I fell in love with the sound of my insides hitting the ground.” That could mean disemboweling, or vomiting, or it could be a twist on the worn metaphor of spilling your guts—a twist that restores the grossness of the phrase. Something similar happens on the jangly album closer “Nevermind.” The song deals with love (incidentally the craft Chaucer had in mind), how new feelings can resurrect tired gestures like holding hands and make you want to dance in your kitchen. Likewise, The Refrigerator revitalizes Remember Sports’ brand of indie rock, demonstrating how a three-minute song can still rewire your brain simply by being very good. Whatever may happen later, the best part of cleaning out your refrigerator is seeing how much space you have to fill the empty shelves again.
