Swim Team: Home Time | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Isn’t it time to grow up? Put away childish things and … go and pay off some debt. Those aren’t very rock’n’roll sentiments. It could be more of a dour, post-punk thing, a Joy Division slit-your-wrists kinda vibe. That’s certainly one way to go, but Swim Team bring something else altogether -a swirl of sweetness, a DIY jangle, a messy unpreparedness, a sly grin and only a dash of despair- to the looming reality of growing up.

Home Time is a deceptively relaxed sounding record when you consider how fixated it is on work, responsibility and the possibility that the rest of life might be spent in a tiny office cubicle. You might call it a slide into resignation when you consider how much more gravelly, fuzzy and punchy the band used to be on their 2017 Holiday EP. Back then Swim Team channelled much more of the ballsy, tuneful and experimental punk that fans of The Raincoats would be familiar with, but it’s more of a hint now, lurking at the back of the tunes on their debut full-length.

You’ve got to assume that the band’s fairly fluid roster has something to do with that. Core songwriters Sammy Wass and Krystal Maynard are a constant and there’s also TJ now and … beyond that I’m not really sure. Whether it’s the folks or the funk they find themselves in, or both, Home Time is a much more cosmopolitan beast. The reverb is less threatening here: it’s like being gently inebriated, rather than lost in a curtain of shadows. From within that atmosphere the surf-rock guitar ambles out, like the late, great Dick Dale after he popped a few valium. One element of the old punk sound that’s really been retained is the jangle, although the off-key guitar and vocals and off-kilter drums is now more like the Flying Nun sound at its sweetest, not its most cold, ferocious and unforgiving.

Once you mix all of that together,  there’s something that’s inexplicably more than the sum of the parts: it's an exotic flavour, like a '60’s girl group that’s somehow cosmically misplaced in time. Home Time is a record both sad and sweet, with a mature air of acceptance and an undercurrent of discontent. Swim Team have captured that feeling everyone has, that, maybe growing up might just be the end of us. It’s an indefinable sensation of many moods at once an they’re all here on this record. You can scrabble around as you listen, trying to put it all together, while time slowly slips by.

- Chris Cobcroft.