The Go! Team: Rolling Blackouts (Memphis Industries)

By Ben Liew  •  in Music
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In an alternate world where Michael Jackson’s “black and white” ethos has been realised on all levels of consciousness, The Go! Team rule supreme. Back with more Shaft-nostalgia samples, angry guitars, cheerleader-rapper/underage-girl-in-a-band vocals and a full horn section, the Brighton sextet continue to mash up proto-hip hop and indie rock elements in lethal doses on their 3rd album.

Part of the reason why The Go! Team are the band that everyone loves but can’t really remember is that they don’t come out with a new album every year. It’s also the reason why they manage to stay fresh without changing their sound. From their lo-fi explosion into the scene 7 years ago to 2004’s Proof Of Youth and now Rolling Blackouts, here’s a band that just gets louder as if they feed off the waiting period between each release.

Like Viagra spiked to an unexpected chillwaver, the album kicks in with blaring horns and gutsy grrl rapper Ninja spelling out the track, ‘TORNADO’. Subsequently showing their playful side-like a kid who just got on a TV show-is ‘Secretary Song’, which features Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki. ‘Apollo Throwdown’ then reminds us why the folks at TAG loved this band.

Like fellow Brighton icon Fatboy Slim, The Go! Team’s jams are funky sh!t and rave candy at the same time, bringing you up while keeping you happy. The crisp production here adds to the epic sound, especially on the instrumentals that contain xylophonin’, banjo pluckin’, breakbeats and Spaghetti Western moments!

A solo-piano piece called ‘Lazy Poltergeist’ preludes the title track, which is as far as The Go! Team go to step out from their water, flavouring a more gloom rock approach to, uh, rocking. But the star player on this album is Bethany Cosentino (of Best Coast) who featured her voice on the anarchist-activist-inspired single ‘Buy Nothing Day’. “No one took the system because the world was out of bounds/Action is the strategy there’s just no getting round,” she sings. And with a name like The Go! Team, you know they won’t be just sitting on their arses.

Listen to: ‘TORNADO’, ‘Buy Nothing Day’, ‘Yosemite Theme’
If you like this, you’ll dig: Sleigh Bells, Vampire Weekend, !!!
Rating: 3½

Hit up www.myspace.com/thegoteam for more action.