TEAM - The Line From A-B

After An Emergency, Captains Of Industry return to the pages of OndaRock, and once again it's a band, Team, that couldn't care less about the prevailing musical trends of the moment, offering instead a sound firmly anchored in the previous decade. What we like about Captains is their nonchalance, their shameless love of quotation, an aesthetic that runs through much of their output, from the records to the website; and the music follows those same guidelines, hooking back into the most pristine punk-style. "The Line From A-B" is a classic slab of noise-rock, the kind that used to be churned out by the truckload in the 90s, with hints of post-Fugazi/Jesus Lizard, melodies with a whiff of grunge, and the long shadow cast by Steve Albini. Despite being English, from Leicester, Team make their guitars clatter as if we were in Washington D.C., and in truth they nail a handful of songs that aspire to be remembered, at least for a while.

The riffs are well-aimed and effective, the vocals restrained and never intrusive - rightly so, given the singer's less-than-stellar voice; everything is in its right place, and the record ends up being, on the whole, more than enjoyable. The songs, ten of them to be precise, flow by without any particular jolts, since the sound has by now been tamed by a decade of experimentation and syntactic upheavals. "Dead Sharks" doesn't leave much of an impression, taking its cue from the indie grandiloquence of Aerogramme, with a cascade of almost stoner-ish riffs. Worth listening to and wearing out on repeat is "Punk Rock Rotors", fast and full-bodied, the perfect single for MTV and for thousands of former pseudo-indie kids orphaned by Nirvana.

Also worth noting is the noise ballad "1+(2 x1/2)", which dusts off that dynamic of drowsiness and sonic explosions that made the fortune of so many bands, while for "Middle Middle Radio", stentorian and square-shouldered, the rock manual needs to be opened at the entry for Stone Temple Pilots.

It won't blow your mind, but it might be a fun listen.

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30/04/2026