THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Over their six albums The Go! Team have taken sonic day trips to other lands, musically dipping into a host of other cultures. But now, on this, their seventh full-length, they’ve bought a round-the-world ticket that takes them to Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit and more stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures sit side by side — but all still sound unmistakably like The Go! Team, albeit on a kaleidoscopic, cable-access channel hop.
On the vocal roll call, you’ll find Star Feminine Band, an all-girl group from West Africa; the Indian Bollywood playback singer Neha Hatwar; Kokubo Chisato from J-Pop indie band Lucie Too; 19-year-old Detroit rapper IndigoYaj; Hilarie Bratset, formerly of Apples in Stereo; Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott; and a whole host of others alongside Go! Team staple Ninja.
“Maybe it’s an anti-Brexit reflex,” says founder Ian Parton. “A rejection of flag-waving and inward-facing. But this is no Coke ad, some Valium vision of joining hands on a hillside. The Go! Team has always been about knowing what’s happening but focusing on the good shit. It’s about where you let your attention settle.”
Picking up from where 2021’s Get Up Sequences Part One left off, Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. “A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: ‘Look at this. Look at this,’ ” Parton says. “When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up.” Simultaneously messy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. “For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life”, Parton says.
It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken-word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill Building melodies lead into musical handbrake turns, four track into panoramic. Some 18 years after their debut LP, The Go! Team are still unlike anyone else and on Get Up Sequences Part Two they sound as fresh as a club soda.”
