Over their six albums The Go! Team have taken sonic day trips to other lands - musically dipping into other cultures. But now on this, their seventh - they’ve bought a round-the-world ticket…. Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit - all stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures side by side but all still sounding unmistakably Go! Team. Setting the course for a kaleidoscopic, cable access, channel hop.
On the vocal roll call there’s Star Feminine Band, an all-girl group from West Africa, the Indian Bollywood playback singer Neha Hatwar, Kokubo Chisato from J-Pop indie band Lucie Too, 19 year-old Detroit rapper IndigoYaj, Hilarie Bratset (ex-Apples in Stereo), Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott, and a whole host of others, alongside Go! Team staple Ninja.
“Maybe it's an anti-Brexit reflex,” says Parton. “A rejection of flag-waving and inward-facing. But this is no Coke ad, some Valium vision of joining hands on a hillside. The Go! Team has always been about knowing what’s happening but focusing on the good shit. It’s about where you let your attention settle”.
Picking up from 2021’s “Get Up Sequences Part One”, Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. “A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: “Look at this. Look at this”. When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up”. Simultaneously messy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. "For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life”, Parton says.
It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill building melodies lead into musical handbrake turns, four track into panoramic.
Eighteen years after their debut LP The Go! Team are still unlike anyone else and on "Get Up Sequences Part Two" they sound as fresh as a club soda….
+ Baba Ali
Recognised as one of the most electrifying new acts to emerge from the UK in the past year, Baba Ali is the combined force of American performer and musician Baba Doherty and British guitarist Nik Balchin. Following the release of their debut Memory Device in 2021 and 18 months of touring, Baba Ali return with one foot firmly placed on the dance floor, and the other in a state of frenzy. The bold and fiery lead
single Burn Me Out from the upcoming sophomore album Laugh Like A Bomb, serves as a blueprint for what the duo call their ‘electro punk disco’ sound and was premiered by Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music. Having previously collaborated with Al Doyle (LCD Soundsystem / Hot Chip) on their debut album, this time the duo absconded to Doyle’s studio in his own touring absence and took to production
duties themselves. Laugh Like A Bomb was recorded in just three weeks before being mixed by Sheffield producer Ross Orton (Working Men's Club / M.I.A. / Yard Act). Onstage, Baba Ali is a captivating and seductive presence, transmitting a wall of sound that fills the room with an infectious raw energy and groove that makes standing still impossible
