It’s not a stretch to say that most tracks on Semicircle could have fit elsewhere in the band’s discography, and few tracks from the Go! Team’s back catalogue would feel out of place on Semicircle.
The Go! Team have one of the most intriguing pitches for your attention on Wikipedia:
“They combine indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of blaxploitation and Bollywood soundtracks, double Dutch chants, old school hip hop and distorted guitars. Their songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources.”
To some this might sound like the pinnacle of a novelty band whose music is based on gimmicks, yet the Go! Team’s mixture of plunderphonics with original material shows an incredible amount of ingenuity. They’re comparable enough to an act like the Avalanches, particularly the latter’s second album Wildflower. However, the main difference is that Go! Team’s four releases since 2004 have eschewed lengthy concept albums in favor of a more simplified style rooted in pump-you-up anthems that embrace a childlike naivete, thanks to the band’s penchant for instruments like xylophones and vocal effects that make it sound like a cheer team are shouting each line.
The mission statement of the Go! Team’s fifth release Semicircle embodies this energetic and carefree feeling perfectly. Band mastermind Ian Parton describes the album as: “the idea of a school marching band gone rogue, chucking away their sheet music to blast out Northern soul stompers or Japanese indie-pop swooners or old-school hip-hop jams.” This may sound like influence overload, but the album’s lead single “Semicircle Song” may help provide an “a-ha moment.” Led by horns that evoke the aforementioned marching band and featuring vocals from the Detroit Youth Choir, this track’s sunny disposition reaches its peak when its vocalists list their astrological signs over steel drums.
If happy-go-lucky tunes like “Semicircle Song” aren’t your scene, then you’re frankly unlikely to enjoy either Semicircle or anything else the Go! Team have released. Much like Matt & Kim, the Go! Team have long been a ray of sunshine in a field saturated with prophets of doom, and they’ve remained remarkably consistent since releasing their debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike 14 years ago. For instance, the opening track “Mayday” might begin with the surprising sound of Morse code that spells out its title, but the combination of horns and cheer chants that enter soon after mark Semicircle as an unmistakably Go! Team effort.
This combination of shouts and horn samples has become something of a trademark sound for the band, and it reemerges later on Semicircle with “All The Way Live,” which samples an unnamed “1983 after-school hip-hop project” to provide rapping on its verses. Yet the pinnacle of this signature Go! Team style comes on “She Got Guns,” where recurring band member Ninja (British rapper Nkechi Ka Egenamba, not the guy from Die Antwoord) lets out bars that make it the album’s strongest track. This 70s funk-meets-cheer-squad style might feel formulaic five albums in, given that it all started with “We Just Won’t Be Defeated” on Thunder, Lightning, Strike, but it’s hard to deny that it’s a winning blend that really captures the band’s outlook.
The most noticeable evolution the Go! Team have made since their debut is the gradual introduction of more conventional pop songs, where original vocals hold more prominence than any sample-based collage. This resulted in 2015’s The Scene Between, which is arguably the most unique Go! Team album in that it contained minimal sampling and no rapping nor horns. Semicircle is less maximalist, balancing older Go! Team sounds with a healthy dose of cutesy tracks, as done on Proof of Youth and Rolling Blackouts. “Chain Link Fence” is a sweetly sung number with contrasting lyrics like “But maybe your feelings won’t change over time? But what if they never were the same as mine?” and “There’s something here to belong, there’s something here to believe in.” Elsewhere, “The Answer’s No – Now What’s The Question?” has a psychedelic interlude including what sounds like a sitar, and “If There’s One Thing You Should Know” is buoyed by steel drums. The twee-ness of these tracks are sure to draw comparisons to bands like Camera Obscura or Belle and Sebastian, but their inclusion on Semicircle makes the album a grab bag of different vocalists and genres, each evoking a different era, which helps demonstrate what it must be like to dig through crates of old records for samples.
While the Go! Team’s indie pop songs might have gotten better over time, their instrumental songs have unfortunately gone the opposite direction. Thunder, Lightning, Strike managed to be an excellent debut where half the tracks were instrumental, including highlights like “Get It Together” and “Junior Kickstart,” while the instrumental songs on Semicircle feel like half-hearted interludes. “Tangerine / Satsuma / Clementine” is a minute and a half of unmemorable rock jamming, while the title of “Chico’s Radical Decade” proves to be a misnomer, sounding more like the intro to a public access news show. And while “Hey!” isn’t purely instrumental, most of the track consists of its title word remixed into a cacophony, with a French spoken word interlude in towards its end that makes you think “…what just happened?”
However, picking out the nuances between different Go! Team albums is ultimately an uphill battle. While The Scene Between was an outlier for its exclusive focus on original pop songs, the other Go! Team albums, Semicircle included, are fairly comparable to one another. It’s not a stretch to say that most tracks on Semicircle could have fit elsewhere in the band’s discography, and few tracks from the Go! Team’s back catalogue would feel out of place on Semicircle. This interchangeability isn’t an inherent drawback since the Go! Team do have a knack for solid songwriting, yet listening to the fifth Go! Team album and generally knowing what to expect is a significantly different experience than eagerly listening to Thunder, Lightning, Strike for the first time. Semicircle’s marching band may have gone rogue and discarded their sheet music, but their songs start to sound familiar after a while.
You must be logged in to post a comment.