|
|
|
(See below for details on our Go! Team CD giveaway contest!)
The Go! Team are my musical heroes of 2005, and this is the most kaleidoscopic, frenetic, soulful mishmash of an album that you ever couldn't help shaking your booty to. They combine sounds that range over 4 decades of popular music, from 60s girl groups to 70s TV themes to 80s hiphop to 90s noise-rock. In doing so, they create music that is both powerfully nostalgic and vibrantly in the moment.
Hailing from the UK, the band combines live instruments with low-tech samples and electronics. The songs were recorded on the cheap and on the fly in bandleader Ian Parton's basement, and outside sounds like sirens and car horns can be heard in a couple of spots. The sound is lo-fi, raw, and immediate, and the cut-and-paste edges are rough.
The songs invite colorful descriptions. "Ladyflash" reminds me of another UK act that uses retro samples, Noonday Underground, but the style here is less London go-go boots and more Motown bellbottoms, plus "Tighten Up" guitar, old-school hiphop blippy noises and scratching, and crowd sound samples. "The Power Is On" is heavy and dramatic like The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," but sonically denser and with a bit of a spy-movie-soundtrack twist. "Get It Together" evokes an imaginary scenario where an indie rock band, a banjo-wielding Kermit the Frog, and Terminator X team up to teach a 4th-grade music class. "Junior Kickstart" is the ultimate car-chase song, with Sonic Youth guitars, 70s cop-show horns, fierce drumming, and frenetic tambourine. "Bottle Rocket" is like The Electric Company in a blender with the Sugar Hill Gang, and showcases the old-school rhymes of The Go! Team's ebullient MC, Ninja. The soft-shoe piano ditty "Hold Yr Terror Close" (where drummer Chi takes the mic) is like a crackly, lo-fi transmission directly from someone's soul. "Everyone's a V.I.P. to Someone" takes a sample from "Everybody's Talkin'" and you can picture the young Jon Voigt hitting the city streets in his cowboy boots. Common features of some of the tracks are Parton's wailing harmonica and group shout-along vocals that sound like a cheerleading squad or double-dutch team, and the lyrics are mostly manifestos of empowerment and/or entreaties to move one's butt (which audiences at The Go! Team's electrifying live shows are hard-pressed to resist).
The songs evoke a torrent of seemingly polar adjectives: celebratory and melancholy, postmodern and innocent, tough and tender, raw and complex. Far from being a calculated, academic exercise in cool, detached postmodern sound collage or pastiche, this album springs to messy and glorious life as though channelled directly from the band's collective memories of popular music and culture. The band achieves strong emotional resonance using musical references and associations not just for their own sake but as an expression of an obvious desire to unite and communicate with audiences. It's brilliant, and inspiring, and, dare I say it, life-affirming. (mike.11.05)
rating
related links
we have a winner!
Our contest to give away a copy of this CD is now over. Congratulations to our lucky winner! Our trivia question was: What reclusive genius musician/producer did a mega-remix of the songs "Ladyflash" and "Huddle Formation"? (Hint: he's bloody brilliant!) The winning answer was Kevin Shields.