Sports Bar

There’s two kinds of garage bands: those who’s musical endeavors are limited to practicing in their parent’s basement between rounds of bagel bites, and those that take firm grasp of the loud, fuzzy, rawness of the pre-digital era and channel it into the kind of rock n’ roll you can fuck, fight, or party to, or all three. Sportsbar is the latter.

The band, which features Kemper Blair on vocals and bass, Stuart Holt on drums and backing vocals, and Cliff Boyd on guitar, has been around for less than a year, but their roots go back almost a decade. Kemper and Stuart, who grew up together in Richmond’s West End, have been conspiring musically since at least 2003, in bands such as Rabbits, Dead Goats, and most recently, Cubscout and the Rhinocerous.
I got a chance to see Sportsbar (previously known as Shart Attack) play in Church Hill last night, and though the set lasted no longer than twenty minutes, and the room was cramped and hotter than hell, the band used the nasty conditions to their advantage, and killed it. For a band as straight-forward as Sportsbar, there’s a lot to be said about the band’s musical style. Kemper’s vocals manage to meander between higher range singing and a certain hoarse yell, while his work with Stuart on the rhythm section mixes a little bit of throw-back pop rock with a little bit of post-hardcore and some mid-nineties punk for good measure. Cliff’s classic fuzzy distortion and occasional shredding ties the whole thing together into a hard, loud, straight-up rock sound. It could be a stretch, but at a glance I would say that if Cheap Trick made a bad decision after a night on the town, and happened to go home with Hot Water Music, Sportsbar is what would happen nine months later.

Another, much simpler way to put it, is that the band takes an older, well-worn, sound, and puts that classic Richmond rawness into it. Contemporaries could include bands like Little Master and The Sreaming Females (not from Richmond, but still east coast, and sharing in similar qualities). Though the band has no recordings available currently, rumor has it they are hard at work on a yet untitled album, presumably for digital download, and if their previous endeavors are any clue, it should be worth the wait. Though their next confirmed outing is not ‘til August 7th at Strange Matter, random last minute appearances are not uncommon for this crew, so keep your eye peeled. - RVA Magazine