By Chris DeMento
If I had been liquored up, like good and wedding-reception drunk, the Go! Team, who appeared Oct. 19 at Mezzanine, would have doubtless been an even more enjoyable show. They crammed their set full of frenetic, fizzpop, indie-hop dance numbers, deviating only twice to play something softer, slower, more coquettish. The better part of it was all getaway cars, poprocks, and coke.
The old stuff – like “Panther Dash” and “Lady Flash” – is written with a recipe that calls for one part rock ‘n’ roll posturing, one part disco synthfunk, and one part hip-hop brio. Mix in a simplistic glockenspiel, substitute semi-inspired harmonica lines, tinker about on toy instruments – and smile pretty and laugh and keep it genki! And throw your hands up in the air and jump and yell, “Yay!” and “Go!” and “Whoo!” a whole bunch of times. The stuff they played off the new album bears a listening, if only for the sake of close comparison to the old. The crazydancy rock-hop formula still works.
The Go! Team should be noted for doing what so many UK bands before them have also succeeded in accomplishing – that is, for putting fundamentally American tropes to colorful, original use. Not to call them Lennons
– far from it. But it’s undeniable that the warm reception they received from their 35-and-younger Mezzanine audience had much to do with their manipulation of popular American forms, specifically hip-hop. Their approach presents itself just clearly enough, without overpowering the other ideas in the music – a convenient influence that remains almost topical so as not to scare off the alt-indie-dance-pop rockers. For the Go! Team, hip-hop works best as a component, a third of their sum polyphony, and in this way, lead vocalist Ninja provides a more rhetorical, rhythmically additive element than any real semantic purpose or tonal value – perfect for white folks who don’t own any Nas records but fondly recall the Rob Bass days. (And this is all right crafty on the part of the band, if you ask me.)