Team Waterpolo

Until they start stuffing recording equipment into the womb to capture the first foetal gurglings of the next Tom Clarke, there’s not much earlier we can get to hear a band than this. With the entire A&R pack descending en masse on their very first gig back in November, Preston popstrels Team Waterpolo’s debut single arrives three months later, not just box-fresh but still with its umbilical cord attached.

Team Waterpolo have crashed out of the blue so perfectly formed they might well have been designed by Steve Jobs out of leftover bits of the Lightspeed Champion record. Opening with a cheap synth buzz that has you half expecting Los Campesinos! to leap out from behind the stereo and beat you to death with a massive Sherbert Dip Dab, ‘Letting Go’ quickly glides into a glammed-up, glitter-clapping, pant-swaying party anthem that sounds like Hot Chip’s ‘Ready For The Floor’ whacking on a pink bubblegum wig, 3ft platform heels and a boob-tube and hitting the floor at a ’70s disco, ripped to the tits on high-grade Quaaludes. Apart from the bits where it’s clearly ‘business time’ and they go all epic and smoove like Black Kids dolled up in the skimpiest nick-nacks Agent Provocateur
has to offer.

Now we’ve not seen a picture of Team Waterpolo yet, but if the shot above this review is of four pugly faced Lancastrian teenagers in cagoules and not a gang of lipstick-streaked alien sex-freaks committing acts of unspeakable depravity with a shaved monkey, then rock has been robbed of its new gods and we should all storm the gates of Preston’s 53 Degrees armed with a sackful of Rimmel and luminous hair-dye and splatter them into the 25th-century where they belong.

Mark Beaumont