“Voice Yr Choice”
from the album Rolling Blackouts
2011
iTunes
After a four year interim, The Go! Team signals their much-awaited return to the long player format with, appropriately, a hilarious block of tape hiss — storming out of the gate with their joyously cacophonous lead single “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” (If there has ever been a perfect marriage between track and track title, this would be it).
Much like “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.,” Rolling Blackouts is a natural disaster in musical form — a messy, lo-fi garbage bag full of genres and cultures, overflowing with left-field sonic trickery: corny turntable scratching, shit garage drums, twinkling glockenspiels, and enough spunky cheerleader bravado from frontgirl/rapper Ninja to start a whole squad. No doubt about it — The Go! Team has a sound all their own, mixing Bond theme gusto, show tune grandeur, indie rock clutter, and ’90s hip-hop swagger. They’ve established such a distinct, recognizable sound, even the guest players get caught up in the sweep — Deerhoof vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki lends her adorably childlike chirp to “Secretary Song,” but she might as well be another random discarded instrument in this audible junkyard; it’s both thrilling — perfect for a Friday night windows-down cruise through the big city — and slightly exhausting.
Indeed, the trouble lies not with ambition but in the production. As with the band’s first two discs, the instruments are welded together sonically, like a dance floor chock-full of sweaty grinders, leaving little to no space for dynamics — each tone choked of impact in the flat, claustrophobic recordings. What is at first cute in its clusterfucking energy, riding waves of rainbow-tinted creativity, quickly turns grey and mushy. And when they do bother to strip back the layers a bit, it doesn’t seem to help—the wandering solo piano instrumental “Lazy Poltergeist” sounds like it was recorded on a first take with a computer mic. But if you can fight your way through the shabby recordings, you’ll find some good stuff; “Buy Nothing Day” is a glorious, New Pornographers-esque slice of power-pop with surprising chord changes and a Neko Case-ish chorus. “Voice Yr Choice,” meanwhile, is hypnotic in its psychedelic genre-shifting.
Ultimately, Go! Team die-hards aren’t listening for audiophile levels of perfection — they know what they’re getting into. Each time they roll into town, they bring the same exact thing: a wild, disjointed, ugly, beautiful, demented, poorly recorded mess. And that’s just the way they like it. Still, it’s difficult not to wonder how good of a Team they’d be with one new member: a producer.