New - Summerleague - Summerleague I - LP

Formed in 1997, Chicago's Summerleague was formed by best friends Matthew Brendan Clark (bass) and Sean Kelly (guitar/vocals), who quickly spotted the tapping foot of Dave Robison (drums) while caddying, asking him to drum, because....he 'must' be a drummer. Oh, he was. The band quickly and quietly developed a sincere form of heartfelt and structured emo focusing on the poetics of the genre, both musically and lyrically, in direct response to what Clark and Kelly both felt were slipping or lacking in most local and even national emo bands of the time. "No more of that sloppy, half-assed shit. Write songs that have intentionality and play them well." The sincerity of purpose led to a lack of desire to 'get out there', and pretty soon you ended up with a gem of a band that nobody knew existed, and flew under the radar until disbanding in 2001 after moving together downstate to Charleston, IL (where the booze and the books took over). This untimely but in many ways inevitable demise left a load of new, unrecorded material to the ether, but more so their catalog of recordings which were previously released, except for a limited CDEP on Forge Again Records and various demos. Their sound can be connected to Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, and Texas is the Reason while lyrically, Clark's writing drew on Blake Schwarzenbach and apocalyptic visionary poet William Blake in equal measure. The band played regularly in and around Chicago, but made no attempt to tour, resulting in a dense, developed, yet lost body of work that has been long overdue for a proper release. This digital release collects the complete recorded output of the band, spread out over 4 proper studio sessions and 2 DIY basement studio sessions between 1998 and 2001.