After missing their appearances a year ago at Mercury Lounge and Southpaw, along with last November’s show at Webster Hall, I decided to go see THE GO! TEAM, despite the fact that I’d heard less than positive reviews of those shows. After watching them tear up Northsix, though, I can honestly say that I have no idea what everyone was complaining about. Sure, they’re a bit sloppy and ramshackle live compared with the relative slickness of their terrific album Thunder, Lightning, Strike, but it’s all part of the fun, and the songs themselves were still recognizable in these live versions.
For the uninitiated, The Go! Team is a mixed race and gender group of six British ladies and gentlemen whose music encompasses everything from early ‘70s soul, old-school hip-hop and garage rock to modern-day electronica and indie-rock, all under one umbrella. Samples of all of the above are key to their sound, but not so much that they have trouble reproducing their sound live. They are led by multi-instrumentalist IAN PARTON, but on stage, the lead vocals and enormous stage voice of NINJA are the main focus.
During the course of their set, many of the members switched instruments, from drums to keyboards to bass to guitar and back again. I even saw Ninja play keyboards on one song, and on many songs, they had two drummers pounding away on their kits. Predictably, they played most of Thunder, Lightning, Strike (including my favorite “We Just Won’t Be Defeated”) along with some new ones and non-album tracks like “The Icestorm” and “The Wrath of Mikey” which lead me to think that their next album will be a similar triumph.
They ended the main set with “Hold Your Terror Close,” a piano-heavy ballad sung by dynamo drummer KY TAYLOR. Her vocals are reminiscent of MO TUCKER on songs by THE VELVET UNDERGROUND such as “After Hours,” on which she sang lead. They then encored with with “Ladyflash,” as Ninja did some karate kicks worthy of her stage name and encouraged the audience to sport their dance moves. Of course, this being Brooklyn, very few audience members danced along, but I could still tell that the crowd was really impressed and into it the entire time.
And why shouldn’t they be? The Go! Team rode into town fresh from their appearance at SXSW and proved all the naysayers wrong, without a doubt!
