Heaven, London
The Go! Team's founder and songwriter, Ian Parton has said the band's new, third album, Rolling Blackouts, may be their last. He is unlikely to be dissuaded from this intention by the record's reviews, which have implied that the group's frantically eclectic ethos has begun to yield diminishing returns.
Yet the Go! Team are not a band with whom familiarity should breed contempt: indeed, there is a case for saying that anybody who is tired of their fantastical amalgam of old-school hip-hop, funk and pop is tired of music. More happens in tonight's opening song, the slew of frenzied brass, lewd synths and B-girl attitude that is TORNADO, than happens during most entire gigs.
Parton has spoken of the album relying less on TV samples and more on original instrumentation, but in truth the end result sounds the same: utterly exhilarating. The visual focus remains gobby frontwoman Ninja, a diminutive human dynamo so caught up in the joy of noise that she constantly appears on the verge of spontaneous combustion.
Every Go! Team song sounds like the theme to a cartoon action-film car chase. The brash Voice Yr Choice could be Salt 'N' Pepa somehow infiltrating a 60s bubblegum-pop girl band; Secretary Song and Ready to Go Steady sound like the work of precocious sugar-rush toddlers let loose in a school instrument room. Nobody does this better; nobody else does this at all. It would be understandable if the Go! Team were weary after a decade of making music this infectious and ingenuous, but if they are to implode, they will be sorely missed.
At HMV Institute, Birmingham (0843 221 0100) on Thursday. Then touring.
Christina Milian Kelly Brook Robin Tunney Kate Groombridge Dania Ramirez
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