Review Summary: Genre: Defying
You’ve probably heard The Go! Team. Maybe not *of* them, but you might’ve passed by a song or two of theirs in the wild. Watched One Tree Hill? The cheerleader scene with Lucas’ “our lives are a series of images” monologue has them in the background. They ran a music video on Cartoon Network. They were the background music for a viral flash game, and were in the soundtrack for others (Lumines II, Little Big Planet). The same could be said for a lot of underground bands out there, always skirting the edge of the public eye and making appearances in car commercials or being the backing track to some emotional moment in a television drama. We live through these things, passing them by and often not thinking much of them. And before I start to sound like the aforementioned One Tree Hill monologue, I’ll get to the point. There are a few bands that people can point to growing up that they fell in love with and influenced their taste. For middle school me, the biggest one was The Go! Team, who I sought out after hearing all those examples I just listed. What I stumbled on was a band that would help me through tough times, and help me branch out in my listening habits.
It would make sense, as the man behind the band takes a lot of influence from a lot of different things. Spearheaded by Ian Parton in the 2000s as a solo project, The Go! Team’s debut Thunder Lightning Strike set the stage through mixing soul and 60s pop samples (among other things) with danceable grooves that lie somewhere between hip-hop and rock. Brass instruments tended to stand out, all the sounds conglomerating into this messy, fuzzy, lo-fi extravaganza. But its sequel, Proof of Youth, is what we’re here to talk about. And that is everything Thunder Lightning Strike was, but somehow more.
Everything from before is still there - the old pop samples, the high energy grooves, the cheerleader-slash-double dutch chanting - it’s just turned up to 11. In the first minute of the record alone we’re introduced to wailing guitars and intense drumming that meld into a 80s female freestyle rap as trumpets start to blare in from the sides. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. The following track reveals that The Go! Team isn’t quite a solo project anymore. The band finds its vocalists in its female members Ninja (who raps), Kaori Tsuchida (also credited with guitars, keyboard, and glockenspiel) and Chi Fukami Taylor who occasionally pops up when she’s not drumming. Other guest female vocalists (and Chuck D from Public Enemy) are all over this record (and their discography in general - barring Chuck D). They help add a playfulness to the cacophony that the rest of the band creates.
And my goodness is it a cacophony. Take ‘Titanic Vandalism’, by far the most explosive, noisiest track in the bands discography. It’s a mess of cymbal crashes, screaming guitars and blaring brass over a near indiscernible rap courtesy of Ninja. It’s not easy to listen to, either. The whole thing feels compressed and fuzzy - I wouldn’t argue at all that sonically there’s too much going on here.
But the energy is palpable.
Most of the tracks are like this. Proof Of Youth is filled with this manic energy that takes every aspect of the band and pushes them to its limit. Almost every track has some kind of overwhelming or triumphant moment that threatens to - or *does* - tip over the edge into a sea of noise. My personal favorite moment is on ‘Keys to the City’ where an inner-city double dutch group chant segues into this roaring melody with a trumpet as its backbone. It sounds like a celebration and a fight song all at once - as much as double dutch chanting can be a fight song, of course.
An aspect of The Go! Team that you might not catch right away is the idea of the collage. Parton started the Go! Team two decades ago as an experiment in plunderphonics, a genre designed around taking others works and stitching them together with something else. By the release of Proof of Youth, the idea isn’t *as* prevalent, but it’s still very much there. It’s mixed in with an assortment of vocalists from around the world, coming together to give this project not one, but many voices. Booming cut ‘Universal Speech’ has four, and they sing across three different languages. Funk, soul and freestyle samples are integrated to new hip-hop beats or guitar sections. Even the bands artwork suggests the collage in its music videos and album covers.
And that’s what Proof Of Youth is - a collage. It’s a messy, high-energy collage of sound. It wasn’t built alone - it was put together across the world and across decades. It’s obviously not free of criticism. Making an album ‘lo-fi’ only excuses so much in terms of sound quality, and at some point the vocal mixing stops being charming and is just plain grating when it’s nearly impossible to make a vocalist out. But as a kid, all I felt was the excitement in this music and I fell in love with it. It’s the boundless vigor and joy that everyone has in them when they’re so young. Every track is a celebration of instrument and voice, harmony and unbridled energy, and I’ve loved it since I was a kid. That love, that pure vibrancy I felt has never faded in regards to this album. And I guess in that way, it's my own proof of youth.
