The Vaccines’ fourth album Combat Sports combines styles past and present to make an album that doesn’t necessarily push the envelope, but comfortably fulfills its modest ambitions.
When a band sells out shows and is booked on Jools Holland before even releasing a single, it’s safe to say they’ve been hyped up. The Vaccines started off with a bang, boldly naming their full-length debut What Did You Expect from the Vaccines? as a nod to their exponential rise to fame. However, after releasing three albums from 2011 – 2015, it seems the bands’ members started to ask themselves, “well, what do we expect from the Vaccines?”
To be sure, the Vaccines are a quality rock band, but they could never reach the unrealistically high bar the music press set for them at their outset. Generally rooted in garage rock, they plucked the best aspects from a genre that was honed by dozens of bands the decade prior, but suffered from a late arrival to the scene. Their ability to switch between faster, riff-based tracks and slower songs where frontman Justin Hayward-Young croons rather than shouts was certainly novel, but hardly genre-defining in 2011. They branched out into psychedelia, glam, and surf rock, but still couldn’t pin down what made them unique. As Hayward-Young explained, the band thought of calling it quits after releasing English Graffiti in 2015, wondering if they were “just another indie rock band.”
Be glad that the Vaccines didn’t give up, because Combat Sports is an album that shows why the band received so much buzz in their early days. By combining styles past and present, the Vaccines have made an album that doesn’t necessarily push the envelope, but comfortably fulfills its modest ambitions.
Despite having all the trappings of a garage rock revival album, down to the same fuzzy guitar riffs band have experimented with since the 60s, Combat Sports bears little resemblance to its 21st-century peers. Yes, the backing vocals on “I Can’t Quit” make it sound like a Wombats song, but aside from this exception, the album is mostly the Vaccines doing the best impression of themselves. “Put It On a T-Shirt” has the same psychedelic touches heard on the Melody Calling EP, and the aptly-named “Surfing in the Sky” has the same surf rock vibes heard on “I Always Knew” from second album Come of Age. The mellow acoustic track that marks the album’s midpoint, “Young American,” may be out of character on the album, but is less so for the band when you recall the Please, Please Do Not Disturb EP that was nothing but quiet acoustic tracks. Recalling their more recent history, songs like “Nightclub” and “Out On the Street” have the same frantic glitz that characterized English Graffiti, an album where the Vaccines sounded “borderline unrecognizable” at the time but in retrospect serves as a logical stepping stone to Combat Sports.
Of course, Combat Sports isn’t just a spiritual “best of” album that rehashes the bands’ past successes – new styles occasionally rear their head. The most audible of these is the band’s embrace of the synthesizer, which is likely the result of hiring touring keyboardist Timothy Lanham as a full-time member. The Vaccines toyed with synthesizers on English Graffiti with tracks like “Minimal Affection,” but never to the degree on Combat Sports’ closing track “Rolling Stones.” Elsewhere, the awkwardly-titled “You Love Is My Favorite Band” has the late-70s new wave flavor of the Cars, while “Take It Easy” echoes Ray Manzarek’s trademark keyboard work with the Doors. It’s still by and large a guitar-driven rock album, never approaching the borderline synthpop of other indie bands, but this subtle shift in instrumentation represents one of the biggest changes since What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?
Amidst all the rock experimentation going on, Combat Sports is unlikely to blow you away with its simplicity and straightforward nature. Even within the Vaccines discography, it could have done with a slow burner like “Wetsuit” and without nonsensical lyrics like “I think you sent donations to the wrong side of the road/So I took ’em from their window sill and served ’em a la mode.” Still, Combat Sports benefits from sticking to the Vaccines’ roots, and is the most solid good ol’ fashioned rock album you’ve probably heard in a while.
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