The Go! Team releases their third studio album, Rolling Blackouts. Set to play a string of OZ shows, over the month of May, and featuring on the Groovin’ The Moo line-up, Ian Parton, founder of The Go! Team promises to go hard every night.
It begins with what most musicians call, “The Enemy”, (often spoken with a slight Darth Vader embellishment), the select group of industry people who seemingly determine the divide between the mainstream and the independent music scene. The people who apparently tip the Top 30s, Top 40s, Top this and Top that-s. Yet, to this day, we are still trying to un-complicate what they have complicated. Ian Parton, founder and creator of lively, sample English band, The Go! Team, knows who I am talking about, and he knows them very well. So much so, in 2004 he formed his very own team, armed with a four track tape recorder, 80’s sampler and dynamite ideas, and took on the guys in pinstriped suits. “It was sort of born out of annoyance, with me, annoyance with ‘The Enemy’, and their fantasy of bands of boys with guitars. But I certainly didn’t think we’d be around 7 years later,” he explains.
They are certainly still around. The Go! Team evidently evolved into a boiling pot of energy and vigour and 7 years later came a fantastic collaboration of musical creatives who know exactly how to make noise. Joining Parton on The Go! Team journey are Ninja (vocals), Chi Fukami Taylor (drums), Sam Dook (banjo, guitars, drums) Jamie Bell (bass, noise effects, glockenspiel), Kaori Tsuchida (vocals, keyboards, guitars, recorders, glockenspiels). Using their instruments in a melodic array of musical layers and samples, The Go! Team have turned it up a notch with their latest release, Rolling Blackouts. This 13 track epic rollercoaster ride from beginning to end took an evolved melodic turn, and came out the other side powerful and refined. “I wasn’t thinking, Oh, I need a brass band here, or 30 trumpet players would be cool there, I was really just a slave to the best melodies I had, I horded lots of stuff out of the chaos of ideas and things just kept emerging out of it.”
Contrary to what some reviewers have apparently been saying about Rolling Blackouts, this new record is deliciously daring, and it seems to me Parton has accepted that there will always be good reviews and bad reviews. However, when I asked him about the evolution of The Go! Team sound, Parton was quick to admit he thinks this third album is a lot more ambitious than their predecessors, Thunder, Lightning, Strike and Proof of Youth; Ian admits, “This one is much more complicated, more lyrical, more melodic… most of the songs on this one I wouldn’t have been able to do 7 years ago, you know?” In fact, Rolling Blackouts, starts with a pretty spectacular bang. The two-minute power play, ” T.O.R.N.A.D.O”, is led by Ninja in a fantastic, ‘ear-gasmic’ introduction to the bold, brash and undoubtedly kick-ass record. Parton likens this first track to the opening of a film, “You know how Shaft is all about the opening? It’s actually a crap film, but you remember it by the opening… I love brass being used in a really mean, tough way, so I guess it just seemed like the natural thing for me, to put it first.”
Adding another dimension to Go! Team’s sounds are the vocal collaborations which feature on Rolling Blackouts. First single off the record, Buy Nothing Day, which Parton describes as a, “girls-in-the-garage, West Coast, reverb drenched, pop song,” needed someone who could sing. Parton stumbled across Bethany Cosentino (from US indie band Best Coast, currently making their own waves throughout the world) via Myspace, a long, long time ago, put the idea to her, and she was instantly attracted to the song; “It was a transatlantic operation which worked out really well; I knew I’d wanted her to be a part of it from the first time I heard her.” Cosentino’s beachy, coast vocals fold really well into the layers of the track and it’s obvious why Parton persisted to get her on board.
Being described as one of the festival bands, The Go! Team, have played their fair share of festivals around the world, including Glastonbury, Reading and SXSW. “At a festival, you’re always trying to blow away the band that played before you with sheer energy, basically you’re trying to keep people there, and stop them from going off to buy a hot dog, you know? It’s an opportunity to act like a magnet and pull people in.” However, Parton admits he actually prefers playing headlining club shows, “I love the chaos of a club show, the noise, the atmosphere…”
When The Go! Team hit our Aussie shores, Parton promises to go for it every single night, “We play every night like it’s our last night,” and true to her name, Parton expects Ninja to thrash it onstage.
Originally published on: thedwarf.com.au