The Go! Team
w/Long Ranger, Saturday Knights, Fankick!, DJ Tribbles
Mon July 18, Neumo's, 9 pm, $12, 21+.
Scoff at that exclamation mark in the Go! Team's name, but they've earned it—certainly more so than ponderous killjoys Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Eclecticism rarely sounds as scissor-kickingly fun as it does on the Brighton/ London sextet's 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries; a U.S. label deal is imminent). A vibrant combo of densely layered samples and ramshackle live playing, Thunder is a lo-fi kaleidoscope of secondhand sounds rearranged into first-rate, sampladelic pop. If disseminated widely enough, the album could render mood elevators irrelevant. I've been listening to it heavily for weeks, and I feel about half my age now.
The Go! Team's story has touching origins: boy (Ian Parton) meets sampler; boy and sampler get on famously; boy gets five other boys and girls to play instruments and sing over main boy's dazzling latticework of samples; their chemistry is combustibly compatible; voilà—Thunder, Lightning, Strike.
The 31-year-old Parton formed the Go! Team—female MC Ninja; Jamie Bell (bass); Sam Dook (electric guitar, drums, banjo); Chi Fukami Taylor (drums); Silke Steidinger (drums)—in order to "experiment with the idea of slamming together different kinds of sounds next to each other—stringing together all of my favorite kinds of music—in a way, hopefully, people hadn't done before," he says from England, where his band's gearing up for a brief North American tour, including Pitchfork's Intonation Festival.
Parton particularly fancies Northern soul, '60s girl groups, Sonic Youth, breakbeats, Bollywood strings, themes to Degrassi Junior High and Peanuts, and "upbeat, trumpety music, the theme from Rocky. It's all my favorite kinds of music welded together and mixed with live instruments. I hope to make something new out of old stuff."
You'd think from his songwriting approach that Parton would have a record collection that could fill a U-Haul truck. But he claims his "only" totals about 600. "I have quite a lot of random stuff, thrift-store discoveries," Parton says. "If you played them on their own, if you played the whole song, they'd sound pretty dodgy. I take little bits and pieces and transform it by distorting it or cutting it up or playing different chords on top of it."
Unlike some lazy producers, Parton's "never been content with just getting a sample and looping it for three minutes. It's all about changing it or contrasting it with something else, or cutting it up, making something new out of it."
Speaking of making novelty out of moldy-grooved snippets, the Go! Team have been compared by many critics to Australia's the Avalanches, whose 2001 album, Since I Left You, fatigued even more record-company lawyers than Thunder has done. Both ensembles share a love for complex collage, stylistic promiscuity, and samples that excavate any given song's most uplifting aspects. Both artists induce a nostalgia for times and places you probably never experienced. However, Parton thinks the comparison is off base.
"I started writing a lot of the songs [on Thunder] before I ever heard the Avalanches' album," he claims. "It's similar in the way they have a cut-and-paste mindset and way of working; you get dusty old vinyl and gel it together. [But the] choices they'd make and the choices I'd make are completely different. They're much more club-y, house-y kind of people. I come from a much more noisy-guitar background. The production is quite different, as well. The Avalanches' is quite clean and ours is more trashy and deliberately in the lo-fi style."
With its replication of double-dutch chants, breathlessly euphoric tempos, and naively ebullient melodies, the Go! Team's music captures the innocent enthusiasm and unrestrained joy of (some people's) childhood. "A lot of people have been picking up on that and attaching [our music] to memories," Parton observes. "But I'm anti-nostalgia, in a way. [Thunder] wasn't supposed to be retro; it was supposed to be new. [laughs] Maybe I haven't achieved that. I'm a bit suspicious of romanticizing the past. But, like I say, I am a fan of a lot of sounds associated with the past—brass and strings, etc. There are lots of songs I've written that are even happier, but I was shying away from using them because I don't want to be too sickly. I want the music to have an edge and not have too much of a rosy glow around it."
Nah, the glow's actually more golden, and its effect is like a sonic fountain of youth. ■
