Team Waterpolo

Despite the fact their name sounds like something a rowdy, rugby-shirt-wearing bunch of Tory-voting university sports club members might christen themselves on a Saturday night binge-drinking exploit, Preston’s fresh-faced Team Waterpolo are actually excellent. A youthful, eight-legged pop machine running on pure enthusiasm, their opening two songs touch fleetingly upon every musical genre known to man, and manage to sound – at various points – like Beck fronting the world’s most schizophrenic surf-rock group, Beastie Boys and The Muppet Show’s house band, The Electric Mayhem. And all they’ve really said by this point is, “Hello!”

Team Waterpolo are, refreshingly, all about fun. At no point this evening are things ‘taken down a notch’ – you suspect that they wouldn’t know how to anyway. ‘It’s Our Life’ starts off sounding not too dissimilar to Justin Timberlake before morphing into a filthy, melodic slice of robo-rock, incorporating the kind of chorus Tom Clarke might write if he’d never crossed the Job Centre threshold, while ‘So Called Summer’ will inevitably
be the trench-footed highlight of your festival season this year. An altogether too-short set is rounded off with debut single ‘Letting Go’ but it’s clear that, short and sweet though tonight is, Team Waterpolo are soon going to be inescapable. They’re simply too good a time to turn down.

Barry Nicolson