Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream

British lo-fi outfit made groundbreaking work with their debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike. A blend of hip-hop, pop, electronic, bossa nova, and  70s elevator music, The Go! Team was bringing something fresh and untapped.  The new-found success surely affected their approach to the next critically acclaimed Proof of Youth, as they moved closer and closer towards becoming a one-dimensional hip-hop non-sequitur.  Not my cup of tea, but I will readily admit that The Go! Team’s latest Rolling Blackouts is absolutely wonderful.

Strangely nostalgic in its sound, Rolling Blackouts goes back to what The Go! Team does best: refreshing and modernizing older sounds. Take the short “Lazy Poltergeist”, a delicate piano interlude that seems to long for a simpler time when keyboards were all you really needed. Yet not too much earlier on the album, “Apollo Throwdown” takes a harp, an orchestra of strings, lays a backbeat down, on which TGT drops their signature anthemic rap vocals.  “Bust-Out Brigade” begins with blaring horns more suited for a 80s cop movie, but this instrumental gets more and more intriguing as layers of xylophone and synthesizers get a hold of it. “Buy Nothing Day” sounds like it might have been ripped right out of a mid-90s pop song, but it works. The Beach-Boys-like “Ready to Go Steady” is perhaps the most joyful song on the album, and if the chorus doesn’t stick in your head for days I’d be surprised.

I could go on, but for the sake of brevity I won’t. So go and grab a copy of The Go! Team’s Rolling Blackouts.

Listen to “Apollo Throwdown”

Listen to “Ready to Go Steady“