The Go! Team, The Grates@ Corner Hotel, 29/7/05

Thu 4th Aug, 2005 in Music Reviews

I was trying to explain The Go! Team to a 14 year old recently, and this is what I came up with:

“They’re six people, who sound a bit like a Year 10 school band, but also like a rock band that really like to make people dance and be happy.”

So that’s what I was looking forward to last Friday night. Main supports were two-thirds girl band The Grates- I’ll refrain from calling them the obvious superlative, but they were excellent. Very intense. Their crazy singer, Patience, just kept jumping around the stage like a hyperactive kid, and even in the ridiculously fast songs she kept in time perfectly. And all this accompanied by just a guitar and drums. An impressive performance that made me want to buy their disc, and find out if she has a boyfriend. But I didn’t.

Before The Grates was Mid State Orange who had music on the good side of mediocre, but it was agreed that their singer’s voice wasn’t interesting enough. Unfortunate.

Which brings us to the much-anticipated, always intense Go! Team. Six skilled skinny superstars of sugar-fuelled intensity. Two drummers in most songs, very much complicatedly in time with each other. A few of the band members played three or four instruments each. Like the Blue Intense Girl who played keyboard, recorder, piano-recorder, drums… and Banjo-man who played guitar, banjo, keyboard, and drums.

Ninja, the rapper singer girl was front and center most of the show, which was nice considering her vocals take a backseat on the album. And Kai, their main drummer even got up to sing a plaintive song in the middle. Multi-talented the lot of them. It’s just a shame they only played for 55 minutes, including the euphoric encore of Ladyflash.

After this gig, I am of the opinion that it’s important for a band to have a name that is easily chanted/sung in time. This is crucial for getting the audience to participate in the show. For instance, ‘The Hives’ has eight letters, which can be an eight-beat chant: T-H-E-H-I-V-E-S. Unwieldy, but it works nonetheless. ‘Go! Team’ obviously has six letters, and two parts, which can also be chanted or sung or made into a call-and-response thing with the crowd. This is what Ninja did numerous times, to good effect. She improvises sometimes, but it’s a part of many of their songs also.

So their set started off with Panther Dash which like every one of their songs builds to a craziness after 15 seconds that just makes you want to bust out moves on the dancefloor. I was a bit disappointed that I could barely hear Mastermind Ian’s harmonica part (which forms a major part of the melody), but I was very glad when in later songs his harmonica got its rightful place in the limelight.

They played numerous b-sides as well as most of the songs from their album, including the slower banjo song Everyone’s a V.I.P. to Someone, the fast-rap dance whirlwind of Air Raid Gtr, and the crowd-pleasing, dance-inducing Bottle Rocket.

A constant theme of the night was intensity, from The Grates until The Go! Team finished two hours later. They played a new song called We Just Won’t Be Defeated, which Ninja said would be ‘slow and powerful’, but really it was just as intense and crazy as all the others.

One of the highlights of the night was Junior Kickstart, the amazing trumpet-carried frantic dance, like a Western movie with the hero horse-riding over barren hills, past cacti, to save the day. It could also be likened to a really intense car-chase scene in a seventies cop show. It finishes in a climax where it’s as if the cop is chasing the baddies around dumpsters and dusty alleyways, hurdling car bonnets as the dry sun glints off their windows. That’s what this band is about. Intensity. And catching the bad guy.