Search Results for:

THE GO! TEAM

The Go! Team

Thunder, Lightning, Strike - 2023 Reissue

    ‘One sick party record bursting with overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and battling drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barrelling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men’ Pitchfork 8.7 BNM

    The Go! Team burst onto the scene back in 2004 with their debut album “Thunder, Lightning, Strike” putting the disco in discordant & red limiting all the levels. They scored Pitchfork Best New Music, a Mercury music prize nomination and, from a small bedroom concern in Brighton, UK, emerged to take on the world, lighting up stages on every continent.

    Nineteen years later The Go! Team, led by main man Ian Parton and MC Ninja, are still releasing brilliant, ever more eclectic albums (see this year’s Get Up Sequences Part 2).

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Panther Dash
    2. Ladyflash
    3. Feelgood By Numbers
    4. The Power Is On
    5. Get It Together
    6. We Just Won't Be Defeated
    7. Junior Kickstart
    8. Air Raid GTR
    9. Bottle Rocket
    10. Friendship Update
    11. Hold Yr Terror Close
    12. Huddle Formation
    13. Everyone's A V.I.P. To Someone 

    The Go! Team

    Get Up Sequences Part 2

      Over their six albums The Go! Team have taken sonic daytrips to other lands-musically dipping into other cultures. But now on this, their seventh-they’ve bought around-the-world ticket....Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit-all stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures side by side but all still sounding unmistakably Go! Team. Setting the course for a kaleidoscopic, cable access, channel hop.

      On the vocal roll call there’s Star Feminine Band, an all-girl group from West Africa, the Indian Bollywood playback singer Neha Hatwar, Kokubo Chisato from J-Pop indie band Lucie Too, 19 year-old Detroit rapper Indigo Yaj, Hilarie Bratset (ex-Apples in Stereo), Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott, and a whole host of others, alongside Go! Team staple Ninja.

      “Maybe it's an anti-Brexit reflex,” says Parton. “A rejection of flag-waving and inward-facing. But this is no Coke ad, some Valium vision of joining hands on a hillside. The Go! Team has always been about knowing what’s happening but focusing on the good shit. It’s about where you let your attention settle”.

      Picking up from 2021’s “Get Up Sequences Part One”, Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. “A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: “Look at this. Look at this”. When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up”.Simultaneouslymessy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. "For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life”, Parton says.

      It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill building melodies leading to musical handbrake turns, four track into panoramic. Eighteen years after their debut LP The Go! Team are still unlike anyone else and on "Get Up Sequences Part Two" they sound as fresh as a club soda....

      TRACK LISTING

      Look Away, Look Away
      Divebomb
      Getting To Know (All The Ways We're Wrong For Each Other)
      Stay And Ask Me In A Different Way
      The Me Frequency
      Whammy-O
      But We Keep On Trying
      Sock It To Me
      Going Nowhere
      Gemini
      Train Song
      Baby

      The Go! Team

      Proof Of Youth (RSD22 EDITION)

        THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

        The Go! Team reissue their second album Proof of Youth for Record Store Day 2022. Long since out of print, this 15 year anniversary edition comes with an exclusive sleeve and a flexi disc of non-album track Milk Crisis and is pressed on bubblegum vinyl. This edition of Proof of Youth is limited to 3,000 copies worldwide. Bombing melodies into the stone-age with its needle-in-the-red, anti-production approach, Proof of Youth lurches from bubblegum pop to white noise in a heartbeat. 

        The Go! Team

        Get Up Sequences Part One

          On “Get Up Sequences Part One” Ian, Ninja, Nia, Simone, Sam and Adam have created a musical world distinctly of their own making. A place where routine is outlawed and perfection is the enemy. Where Ennio Morricone meets the Monkees armed with flutes, glockenspiels, steel drums and a badass analogue attitude. We’re talking widescreen, four- track, channel hopping sounds that are instantly recognisable.

          In The Go! Team's world, old’s cool, the future's bright and melody is the star. Just check the second cut “Cookie Scene” with a bouncing flute and junk shop percussion it introduces guest rapper Indigo Yaj who delivers an old school vocal that continues this sonic trip. Pow channels Curtis Mayfield and enter stage centre, the inimitable Ninja in full flow and you don’t stop, you wont stop to this flute driven free for all.

          By way of demonstrating The Go! Team’s old school manifesto, comes the 'needle-in-the-red' “I Love You Better” a defiant message to an ex love, spelling out exactly how he’s fucked up – and then there’s those steel drums. Following that comes the soda fountain soul courtesy of “A Bee Without Its Sting”, a groovy protest song that makes its point with a tambourine – hey only The Go! Team.

          The musical wagon train then takes you into the wide screen, windswept western that is Tame the Great Plains heading off into a polyrhythmic panorama that’s full of hope. Slappin’ you back to reality comes “World Remember Me Now”, a timely reminder that when you’re lost in the routine of life, you can always count on The Go! Team.

          STAFF COMMENTS

          Barry says: It's exactly what you'd expect from the Go! Team, this it's bright and bold and chaotic and absolutely on-brand. Summery steel drums and syncopated percussion, offset tinny melodies and jangling percussion, topped with jubilant vocal swathes. Brilliantly bright and wonderfully fun.

          TRACK LISTING

          1. Let The Seasons Work
          2. Cookie Scene
          3. A Memo For Maceo
          4. We Do It But Never Know Why
          5. Freedom Now
          6. Pow
          7. I Loved You Better
          8. A Bee Without Its Sting
          9. Tame The Great Plains
          10. World Remember Me Now

          The Go! Team

          Cookie Scene

            The Go! Team return with new single “Cookie Scene’” - a warped Daisy Age jam to melt pavements. A bouncing flute pattern, finger clicks and firing ray guns make the ground for guest rapper IndigoYaj to skip on. Team main man Ian Parton met Indigo in Detroit recording the last Go! Team record “Semicircle” and she brings the Shante tone on “Cookie Scene”.

            With the flute in a locked groove it makes way for junkshop percussion to go front and centre - built from a marching drum, a 50p against a glass bottle, rimshots and the maple on maple of drumsticks hit together. Says Ian: “The stripped back swinging percussion of ‘Iko Iko’ by the Dixie Cups and the loud crunchy shaker in Salt-n-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ were both inspirations and I’ve always loved the way Bollywood or William Onyeabor songs would have random laser beams and electro toms popping up. I wanted to mix the street corner with the intergalactic, to take Detroit to outer space.”

            TRACK LISTING

            A. Cookie Scene
            B. Free Breakfast Program

            The Go! Team have always been cheerleaders for a better world - an outpouring of collective joy in the face of small-mindedness and dismal careerism. They rejoice in the unifying urges and the chance encounters between cultures that lead to something new. They're a band that still has faith in the power of music to make things better. We need The Go! Team now more than ever.

            The Go! Team is the brainchild of one man: Brighton-based, melody-obsessed Ian Parton. But its membership has never been exclusive. Throughout the years, The Go! Team has included on its squad-sheet everyone from Deerhoof to Chuck D to a legion of undiscovered Bandcamp singers. Unlike the group's 2015 album, The Scene Between - which was essentially a solo project that followed the dissolution of the previous Go! Team lineup - their fifth album Semicircle sees Ian collaborating with current live players Simone Odaranile (drums) and Angela 'Maki' Won-Yin Mak (vocals), plus original Team members Sam Dook (guitar) and Ninja (irrepressible rapping).

            Ian had the idea of a school marching band gone rogue, chucking away their sheet music to blast out Northern soul stompers or Japanese indie-pop swooners or old-school hip-hop jams. "I like the swing and the toughness of marching bands, the physicality of feeling a beater walloping a bass drum," explains Ian, "but I wanted to reclaim them from patriotic or sporty associations. That was the kick-off for this record." But his extensive sample library could only take him so far. To fully realise his vision, he knew he had to reach out and entice a group of unlikely new collaborators into the Go! Team fold.

            So Ian made a pilgrimage to Detroit - city of Motown and The Stooges, of musical (and actual) revolution - where he hooked up with The Detroit Youth Choir. Their age was key; he didn't want kids (too twee), but he didn't want adults either, with all their emotional baggage and wariness and tendency to over sing. He also wanted to avoid the religious connotations of a church or gospel choir. "I've always had a thing for gang vocals and group singing, particularly the roughness of community choirs," says Ian. "Normally they might be singing show tunes or whatever, but I like the idea of getting people to do something they wouldn't normally do. I like making things happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. It's always a gamble, but in this case it paid off."

            These inspiring sessions began to define the album. The choir's ebullient chanting is all over the opening track "Mayday," a morse-code-inspired soul belter about a love emergency, in the proud lineage of "Rescue Me" and "SOS." They bring the album to a rousing, defiant conclusion on "Getting Back Up." In between, they reveal a little more about themselves on the heart warming "Semicircle Song." When Ian needed a lo-fi R&B vocal for "Chain Link Fence" - kooky and soulful but not slick or drenched in melisma - he approached a Detroit high school. "I love the idea of recording people who wouldn't think of themselves as singers, who perhaps have never been recorded before."

            But this is a Go! Team record, so routine is outlawed; there are a multitude of other voices to be heard, sometimes in the course of the same song. Best-known among them is probably Utrecht indie-rocker Annelotte de Graaf AKA Amber Arcades, whose Dutch-accented English lends a unique flavour to "Plans Are A Dream U Organise." Previous collaborator Julie Margat AKA Lispector delivers "Hey!''s breathy French interlude. And sassy girl group kiss-off "The Answer's No - Now What's The Question" is fronted by Houston based Darenda Weaver, a Texan Mod that Ian found on Bandcamp.

            The band's own Maki helms "If There's One Thing You Should Know" with panache, and of course no Go! Team record would be complete without an appearance from Ninja, who unleashes a volley of verbal stingers on "She Got Guns." Meanwhile, the charmingly unaffected rapping on "All The Way Live" is sampled from a 1983 "after-school hip-hop project" Ian found on one of his epic crate-digging adventures. He considered asking a contemporary rapper to re-record it, but decided it would be impossible for anyone to unlearn 35 years of hip-hop history. Capturing those moments of authentic joy, unburdened by cynicism and ambition, is what Semicircle is all about.

            In keeping with the album's marching band theme, Ian stacked up sousaphones, glockenspiels and steel drums, mic'ing them all from a distance to recreate that gymnasium sound. The effect is a kaleidoscopic cacophony, almost as if the sound itself is bent and refracted in the metallic curves of a trumpet - comforting and intoxicating at the same time. "It's recognisable as a Go! Team record but it takes the sound to a new place."

            Although Semicircle isn't bogged down by polemical responses to the issues of today, there are still some valuable life lessons to be learned. Ian emphasizes that the vibrant utopia he and his cohorts have created on their fifth album is not an escapist fantasy but a potentially achievable goal. "It's about reminding yourself of the good things in life," says Ian. "We don't want to be dumbly optimistic and say, 'Hey, isn't everything great!' but there's something to be said for just getting on with it, for getting organised and not letting the fuckers get you down. Party for your right to fight!"

            As always, it's good to know The Go! Team are on your side.

            STAFF COMMENTS

            Barry says: If I had a team, and I wanted them to go, i'd probably just expect them to know that that was their goal, and to do it prompt-free but that's probably what separates me from Ian Parton. Also the fact that i've not just released my brilliant new album, shining with insistent jangling chaos, and he has.

            TRACK LISTING

            Mayday
            Chain Link Fence
            Semicircle Song
            Hey!
            The Answer's No - Now What's The Question?
            Chico's Radical Decade
            All The Way Live
            If There's One Thing You Should Know
            Tangerine / Satsuma / Clementine
            She's Got Guns
            Plans Are Like A Dream U Organise
            Getting Back Up

            Lasers through tracing paper, orange tone oscillations, cable access hangover, a K-tel dream sequence, a haunted vision mixer, station wagon-core, straight to video, something in the fog, fluff on the needle, chromakey constellations, a hovercraft on the fret board, faxing a car alarm, a Morse code pep talk, etch a sketch jacknife, a daily Haley's comet, light sound colour motion, a holiday from yourself, Ceefax taking Oracle, second sight summer camp, 360 degree tunnel vision, Chinese whispers by post, the opposite of hula hooping, the geometry of ideas, maxing the minute maid, a teleprompter for your dreams, carry the ten, pathways in patchwork.

            STAFF COMMENTS

            Andy says: Hugely cute indie-pop with an occasional shoegazey bent. Effervescent as ever!

            TRACK LISTING

            CD Tracklist:
            What D'You Say?
            The Scene Between
            Waking The Jetstream
            Rolodex The Seasons
            Blowtorch
            Did You Know?
            Gaffa Tape Bikini
            Catch Me On The Rebound
            The Floating Felt Tip
            Her Last Wave
            The Art Of Getting By (Song For Heaven's Gate)
            Reason Left To Destroy

            LP Tracklist:
            A.
            What D'You Say?
            The Scene Between
            Waking The Jetstream
            Rolodex The Seasons
            Blowtorch
            Did You Know?

            B.
            Gaffa Tape Bikini
            Catch Me On The Rebound
            The Floating Felt Tip
            Her Last Wave
            The Art Of Getting By (Song For Heaven's Gate)
            Reason Left To Destroy

            The Go! Team

            Rolling Blackouts

              The Go! Team return with album number three, including guest appearances from Bethany Best Coast and Satomi from Deerhoof. If you bought the previous two Go! Team albums then you're in for another treat here, albeit one that doesn't differ much from its predecessors. Charging headlong into a blistering mash-up of b-boy hip hop breaks, catchy indie guitar hooks, easy-pop melodies and bratty rap (all with nuff treble to make your ears ring), "Rolling Blackouts" is like being mugged by hand-clapping ADD tweenies in an inner city playground. Boisterous, energetic, and with an infectious charm, it's hard not to love The Go! Team's sunny demeanour.



              Latest Pre-Sales

              158 NEW ITEMS

              E-newsletter —
              Sign up
              Back to top