Send "The Go! Team " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Prefixmag |
 ince debuting in 2004 to acclaim with Thunder, Lightning, Strike, noise-rap-funk'ers the Go! Team have spent just as much time as critical darlings as they have fading from the spotlight. It took three years for the sextet to release their sophomore album, 2007's Proof of Youth, and another four for their third, 2011's Rolling Blackouts. But it seems that the four-year gap has led to a slight change in musical direction for the band. If lead single “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” is any indication, the Go! Team remains rambunctious as ever, though their outlook is not as bright as before. Rolling Blackouts might just be the apocalypse’s perfect party record....full text |
| Titanicfandalism |
| “Some people think of music as self expression, where you’re pouring things out. I think of it as mining. It feels like the perfect song is out there - you just have to dig for it.” Ian Parton 2009 Many times, over the last couple of years, the words to a certain Tom Waits track have come to mind when contemplating what the third Go! Team album might sound like: “What’s he building in there?” Well, as it transpires, Ian Parton has not been building at all - he’s been mining. Digging deep into his phenomenal understanding of what makes music work - and digging deep into an equally vast collection of recorded ideas, samples and the many talents of The Go! Team band, in order to piece together another musical mosaic of melody, mayhem and invention. But, one suspects, he’s also been digging deep into himself. As the above quote confirms, Ian Parton is undoubtedly a perfectionist and it’s not just been a case of meticulously joining the jigsaw together, but of cutting and shaping each piece, with a gem-cutter's precision, to create the perfect fit. From the get-go T.O.R.N.A.D.O. enters the ring like a heavyweight contender - Ninja spitting out the track-title letter by letter before beat-boxing our ears for the two-minute round with a vicious rap combination of lyrical jabs and punchy punctuation, all set to a heavy-hitting background of slicing metallic horns, courtesy of a well-judged Antibalas sample. It makes Public Enemy sound like public schoolboys - and it’s a round 1 KO to the Team. We pick ourselves up, not to the sound of chirping cartoon birds circling our heads, but to the unexpected chatter, clatter and crystal-clear pings of office typewriters. Secretary Song is pure 60s go-go taken for a daytrip to Tokyo for a J-Pop makeover, thanks to some lilting eastern strings and the sublime songbird vocals of Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki. It’s this track, with its astounding array of pop-layered twists, turns and tight-assed hooks - and not the previous pounding curveball delivery of T.O.R.N.AD.O - that sets the tone for much of the new album. With it, comes a sudden euphoric rush of realisation that The Go! Team may just have raised the songwriting bar to dizzying new heights, that are surely impossible to maintain. Maintain it they do through Apollo Throwdown, featuring Dominique Young Unique, a Floridian teenager blessed with the delivery, dexterity and accent of the original female voice of rap that’s been sorely missed since the early 80s. Roxanne Shante had it. Sweet Tee had it. And now it’s back once again, set to a new-look, space-age Go! Team hip-hop takedown of cascading electro keys and those rock-steady DIY NYC streetcorner rhythms once supplied by handclaps alone. The girl gang chants of Thunder, Lightning, Strike make a welcome return for the choruses and, like so much of Rolling Blackouts, this track’s impossible to shift from your head for days, weeks, months… A kinda-familiar drum roll snaps us back to reality and we’re transported from east coast to west for the Californian surf-sound simplicity of Ready To Go Steady. French singer Lispector perfects the vocal, complete with the dreamy talky bit in the middle, over a vitally tight pure-pop backbeat, before we head back east (East Sussex that is) for the first of the album’s four instrumentals - the bold and brassy Bust-Out Brigade featuring real-live super-serious horns courtesy of the Brighton Big Band....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| They may seem like the perfect summer troupe, the kind of thing that’d give Brighton pier (whichever one remains) a bit of sparkle, but deep down you know you’re glad The Go! Team is releasing this now rather than four months down the line. If you don’t have anything new to gorge on as you come to terms with this 2011 thing, then Ninja and co. can give you everything at once in this neat, not-so-little package. Much like Broken Social Scene or Architecture in Helsinki, The Go! Team is an ideal mixtape band, and on Rolling Blackouts it’s as if they made the artwork and set music to fit; songs to hold hands in the sea to, songs to raise your middle finger with, maybe a song to put on while you walk around naked. Yes, friendly nudists, The Go! Team is all things to all people, with its doo-wop pop, its hip-hop beats and its instrumental piano pieces all going to a happy home. Better yet, it all fits when, as the album artwork kind of suggests, it really shouldn’t. You’ll like Rolling Blackouts if you like mixtapes, and you’ll love it if you want Thunder, Lightning, Strike again, but bigger. The quintet delight with their playfulness once more, but this time they expand on it. Namely, it’s louder, even more jam-packed with hooks and quirks, and all for the sake of the sugar-hit. Electronica does the job, for one, with the sparkly “Apollo Throwdown” layered in big, bold strokes. But really, no genre can fail in the many hands of this collective, with Ninja’s rapping over “Voice Yr Choice” feeling customary at this point, and the belching music below- the sly percussion and breezy horn section, devised like a cheeky sleight of hand- the jam’s other half. Every song penned here borrows from the band’s signature sound (an eclectic instrumental, but they forgot to keep it instrumental) but amplifies it beyond that lighter sound we knew. Even so, it’s tempting to call Rolling Blackouts a wholly graceful record in the way it moves- tempting when “Apollo Throwdown” shifts from “Secretary Song” into those dulcet tones, but all swooning aside, graceful wouldn’t quite fit: the Team are loudmouths here, using turntables to fist-pump on “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” and crafting cartoonish parade anthems like “Bust-Out Brigade,” an aptly titled instrumental that, for all intents and purposes, is vintage Go! Team. Rolling Blackouts is still very much lots of music for lots of people, and noisy, but there’s a real fluidity to it, and that’s good: it’s great to write marching pop anthems, but it’s better to keep the march going, and for that reason the Go! Team have created a very impressive body of work. They invite their collaborators, even, to be a part of the band rather than a distracting feature: on “Buy Nothing Day,” Bethany Cosentino takes a break from her summer duties and joins as a vocalist, and she’s a snug fit, even if the song doesn’t have Best Coast written all over it; it’s a harmonious pop song, but it’s a group effort. Deerhoof’s Matsazucki, too, is slotted into “Secretary Song” casually, until the song’s rockin’ conclusion, and then things move on. This is a well-contained party record, one where Ninja doesn’t make herself or anyone else the focus, even if she does kick serious ass on “Apollo Throwdown.”...full text |
The Go! Team lyrics
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