The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike
The Go! Teams’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike is a fabulous album.
- The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike
They’re a wonderful blend of De La Soul, Belle and Sebastian, Saint Etienne, Air, old funk, and Northern Soul, with a few 70s TV theme songs thrown in (I swear I keep catching the theme from The Rockford Files, but then it’s gone again before I can really be sure). Just like The Polyphonic Spree, whose single Soldier Girl The Go! Team re-mixed, it’s just impossible to listen to this album without ending up with a huge grin on your face. Joyous!
Their website has tracks you can listen to, and the video of the current single, Ladyflash, my favourite track from the album, is available from their record company (requires Quicktime).
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:49 pm
Excellent. Just kind of works doesn’t it? Seems much more honest and is
much more engaging than the arch productions of
Air/polyphonic spree, etc.
I heard/saw Malcolm McLaren (Buffalo girls),
The Beatles (White album/zebra crossing) and Talking Heads (some indeterminate nod to new wave).
It’s a hash - but so is bubble and squeak and as we know that tastes delicious!
[Dazr - my text won’t wrap in your boc, hence line breaks]
Good tip, D.
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:33 pm
Chris: pleased you liked it. I agree—it’s a mish-mash of all kinds of different sounds just thrown together and yet somehow it works. I agree too about how the production is more honest; the video was made by the band on Super 8, and the album was, according to the sleeve notes, “recorded in Jan & Ed’s basement”! The whole album is an extraordinary mixture of styles: a couple of the tracks start off Sonic Youth style, just rocking out, and then the sudden inroduction of horns and a tambourine and its seamlessly and perfectly pure Norther Soul!
Re the line wrapping: I don’t know what’s causing that problem. I’ll need to look into it. This is in Safari on Mac OS X, right?
March 3rd, 2005 at 10:12 am
same on Firefox 1.0 for Mac
March 3rd, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Hmmm … I can’t seem to reproduce it in Konqueror (uses the same rendering engine as Safari) and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of this on the WordPress forum. I definitely can’t reproduce it in Firefox in either Linux or Windows. I asked a friend to check in Safari and he couldn’t reproduce it either.
Kris: can you send me a screenshot to me by email?
Chris: can you bring your laptop with you this weekend?
March 3rd, 2005 at 10:38 pm
I met the Polyphonic Spree on the train to London once. They were a groovy bunch of guys, but I was stuck in the middle of the carriage with them for three hours. Of course you never imagine, when you get on a train sit down and start reading the FT, that you are surrounded by weirdos. At first I thought they were christians.
I
March 3rd, 2005 at 10:59 pm
Ivan: you met The Polyphonic Spree? Were they wearing their robes on the train? I’ve seen them live, but that doesn’t really count as meeting them I guess …
March 4th, 2005 at 12:39 am
They were in civvies. When I got on the train everything seemed normal. OK, they were a few Americans on the train. Quite a few Americans. In fact the carriage was full of Americans. They seem to know each other. I was at a table seat and the other three guys at the table were these Americans. I had a window seat! ‘Companies and Markets’ suddenly got very interesting. Every now and then a group of them somewhere on the carriage would start singing a snatch of something. Americans are so fucking polite. The only polite nutters I know are Christians - I thought I was surrounded by some kind of crazy religious sect.
Gradually the truth dawned on me. At Euston I managed to speak to one of them. Yes we are a band, the Polyphonic Spree. Several of the urged fliers on me. They were on their way to do a Radio 1 session.
“Heh heh. You Americans are very groovy. You are a rock band yes? How you like our nice British trains?”
I