Saw the Go! Team on SubPop's guestlist on Sunday night. It was fun in exactly the expected ebbulient way we thought it would be. Here's what the LA Times thought:
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/pop/cl-et-team23oct23,0,2322360.story
POP MUSIC REVIEW
Jumping for joy with the Go! Team
A band that does just one thing can be pretty boring -- unless, it turns out, that one thing is virtually everything.
Jumping for joy with the Go! Team
By Steve Hochman, Special to The Times
Hannah Montana and "High School Musical" may be the sounds of youth today. But the Echoplex in Echo Park was reverberating Sunday with the sounds of youth eternal -- courtesy of the Go! Team.
Sure, the Disney pop phenoms and the Go! Team are all creations of people well past their teens. The English band, masterminded by thirtysomething musician-producer Ian Parton, comes with none of the other's corporate calculations, though. The sounds of cheer-squad chants, Furious Five-like hip-hop, crowd-participation and Double Dutch rhymes all swirl together, topped off with horn and drum flurries that sound like they should be followed by an announcer declaring that the whole thing had been "A Quinn Martin Production." There's even a glockenspiel. How can you not smile at a band with a glockenspiel?
Of course, the Go! Team sound has been pretty much stable since Parton first put together the debut album in his home studio three years ago, before there was even a band to play it live. Neither the new "Proof of Youth" follow-up nor Sunday's show offered much variation on that, and a band that does essentially one thing can be a problem the second time around. But that's not so bad when that one thing is pretty much everything.
Live, it was a never-settling froth, the music and musicians constantly in motion (largely around rapper and quasi frontwoman Ninja), the six members not just jumping around to the popping rhythms but shifting to different instruments from song to song. Ninja, drummer Chi Fukami Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Kaori Tsuchida did a fine job matching the spirit of the cheerleaders and children chant teams featured on some of the album's tracks. The 16 songs rushed by in barely an hour, only the acoustic "A Version of Myself" changing the frenetic pace.
Yes, it would have been nice if the horns were live, not recorded. Maybe the Team could have borrowed the players from second-billed band Bodies of Water, whose set showed that the positive impact of Arcade Fire has reached the L.A. scene.
But even with those slight reservations, this was as irresistibly joyful as anything you'll find. It's probably too much to hope that Montana's Miley Cyrus and the "High School" crew can hold on to their youth as they mature.
