It's not that Paul Sprangers, who is the Hockey Night (which makes you start to think that a lot of the good names have been taken), doesn't deserve to be heard. It's that I can't think of much of a reason for you to hear him. Most of this EP uses all those indie rock sounds and titles that you're probably kind of annoyed with by now, in a home demo style. The EP's best moment (and still pretty forgettable), "There Is No Clear Dividing Point (Pt. 1)," languidly and instrumentally glides along with some softly picked guitar lines and padding orchestral synths. If you're into something uninteresting, and I don't mean that sarcastically, that track might do it for you. The rest isn't nice enough to be nice, or interesting enough to be anything else.
When his music's not being pretty (read: fairly boring), it's outright derivative. Example: he takes a Pixies-esque 6/8 indie slow dance on "Carribean [sic] Blue." But while that one might not be so obvious, the first track is bizarrely obvious. "The Foxy Situation" starts off with some fairly generic distortion-pedal indie rock for about 30 seconds before changing completely and launching directly into an early Modest Mouse... uh... "homage." Gently plucked guitar riffs harmonizing with each other and subtle rhythm changes provide the background for lyrics like, "So much to know, so maybe I'll ask ya / Drive my truck straight through A-la-ska." It's honestly hard to convey in words how much this sounds like a direct rip-off. Although I have a feeling Sprangers's intentions are sincere, I can't ignore it. The song also constantly switches riffs and tones, never returning to anything previously introduced—this works for some people—and continuing to sound exactly like the Brockster in his musical infancy. Except no lisp. And this never happens again for the rest of the EP.
My point is, aside from "Modest Mouse are quite a bit better," that the Hockey Night is a bad name. Why? Because hockey nights are intensely unpleasant, in my opinion, whereas this EP holds a nice parallel to a minor league soccer match. Is there even a minor league in soccer? Maybe they should have gotten someone who likes sports to write about this.
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