Proof of Youth
Back once again it’s The Go! Team, with another treble-heavy adventure in audio, their second album Proof of Youth due for release on 10 September 2007. 2004’s Mercury Music Prize nominated and 250k selling debut album Thunder Lightning Strike came from nowhere to win plaudits and fans alike worldwide with its hybrid of old school hip hop, noise band work outs, TV action show theme tunes and Motown horn blasts. The live show, all electro hand claps, dueling drumkits and garage band guitar thrashings saw the band headline stages at Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds, tour the UK and the US with The Flaming Lips and Sonic Youth and steal the show at Coachella and Lollapalooza. 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. This time the band bring a gang of glorious misfits to the party - including Public Enemy legend Chuck D, the original Double Dutch Divas, Maryland’s pint sized Rapper’s Delight Club, Marina from Bonde Do Role, Amsterdam based Solex and Washington DC’s Frederick Douglas All Star Cheer Team. First single Grip Like A Vice sees b-girls slaying the fellas with brass blasts, a clap machine, a pound shop keyboard and a ton of feedback. Doing it Right sounds like a marching band fully cranked through a marshall stack. Keys to the City is epic widescreen Ennio Morricone transplanted to 70’s Brooklyn. Titanic Vandalism slams blaxploitation boogie against guitar crunch with some heavyweight vocal sparring from the ladyeez. Patricia’s Moving Picture is a sun soaked bus journey through a musical instrument shop. The only let up on Proof of Youth comes in the shape of Vince Guaraldi/Mo Tucker tinged duet I Never Needed it Now So Much and cover version of long forgotten sound track to ITV schools programme My World.
The Brighton band follows Ian Parton's explosive home project Thunder, Lightning, Strike with its first record as both a full-fledged, crowd-pleasing band and a Sub Pop-signed act.
It's difficult to imagine British six-piece The Go! Team sounding like anything other than an aggressively cheerful indie-pop pep squad: When a band traffics in such a distinctive sound, sometimes the best—and most challenging—thing it can do is maintain that momentum. For the most part, the new Proof Of Youth is a…
A word of warning. Don’t approach the new album by The Go! Team if you have any concerns about tinnitus in your old age. If you are quite content to settle in a Sidmouth retirement home bathchair, ears ringing like a Sunday morning churchyard, then feel…
Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their debut album, was a brilliant record and Proof of Youth can't help but suffer when stacked up against it.
'Proof of Youth' opens with 'Grip Like A Vice', in what could be conceived as a mess with samples once against scattered from head to toe – a trick which they used last time, the trick works its magic again.
<p><strong>Garry Mulholland</strong> finds that the spirited Brighton sextet evoke everything that's pleasurable from your childhood.</p>
“Maturity” isn’t necessarily the first word that comes to mind when talking about the music of the Go! Team.
Due to their heavily expansive sound, there have been dozens of creative comparisons applied to the Go! Team.