The Go! Team love the Avalanches. They love them deep in their guts. They love them like a squirrel loves nuts. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I know you're supposed to hold these things against the humans when you're the rock-journalisticka, and I know that I made a pledge the other week to ignore any band with an exclamation mark in their moniker, but in these blue-denim times, hyped/hyped-up combos daring to frolic in kaleidoscopic climes seem worthy of clutching to your bosom. Like their Melburnian heroes, The Go! Team are a band armed with samplers, the six-piece co-ed crew fashioning all sorts of appropriated audio bits-and-pieces into their own loving take on hip-hop-cast-as-wonky-summery-pop. In the live realm, they belt it all out on guitars and bass and drums and organs and all, but in the studio everything's treated the same — to the point where the line between sampled and played is not just blurred, but completely gone, the point being that the origin of such sound is, in the long run, unimportant. Whether the source is a functioning instrument or some dusty slab of wax, all of it gets tossed in the mix-bowl mix of bandleader Ian P, who draws together his Team's favorite sounds — dirty drum-breaks, disco guitar, hopscotch/double-dutch chants, horn samples, folkie harmonica, twinkling tuned percussion, old-skoolist scratching — and submerges them all under the murky hiss of vinyl-nostalgia, giving this all a wholesome glow that separates it from most modes of modernist production. What makes Thunder, Lightning, Strike, the outfit's debut disc, such an easy-to-love affair is the schoolyard exuberance they ply their tunes with. Cuts like "Huddle Formation" literally leap out of the speakers with all sorts of monkeying mischief, this silly spirit likely a product of the combined personalities of the boys and girls within the band. In such, there are few contemporaries to compare it to, save for that local crew whom everyone knows The Go! Team love from their head to their toes.
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