Album Review: The Go! Team Get Up Sequences Part One

Musical obsessive Ian Parton has spent nine years bringing this album to fruition. His passion project The Go! Team originally started with taking multitudes of brief samples to fashion a tapestry of Pop. Or more correctly, Pop Art.
Album Review: The Go! Team
Get Up Sequences Part One (Memphis Industries)

Get up Sequences Part One has the sheen and allure of a Roy Lichstenstein artwork, along with its hyper-real dramatic effect.

Let the Seasons Work opens the album and it immediately puts out a hand and invites you to dance. Bright colourful Pop filled with little hooks and riffs, punctuated by horn accents.

Cookie Scene. Easy reference to Malcolm Mclaren’s curated minor Pop masterpiece Duck Rock. Flute is the lead and is played like a fife. Pop Rap vocals which bounce along with a Ska rhythm accent from the horns. Feet friendly but kept light and airy by the mix. The female lead blends her vocal cadences seamlessly in a Great Song Ska The Cookie!

We Do It But Never Know Why. Musical arrangement has space to breathe. Played at a slightly lagged tempo. Female vocals are sweet as cotton candy. Resurrecting the glory days of Bubble-Gum. Think back to Toni Wine singing backing vocals on Sugar, Sugar.

That was predominantly studio music where the songwriters created the whole product using session musicians only. When it came time to tour, a pick-up band was put together. The Archies were an archetypal (sorry for that pun) Bubble Gum music project created by Brill Building songwriting legend Jeff Barry, with a little help from Andy Kim and Toni Wine.       

The Go! Team have extended that palette. The emphasis is on bright melody and ecstatic Pop momentum. A lot of elements get stitched in, but the result is never cluttered or too busy.

Freedom Now does speed up the tempo. The opening riff sounds like the beginning of the Stooges Search and Destroy. Infused and wrapped around with Bubble Gum and honey. The rhythm riff is the backbone.

This band also gives a nod to the instrumental bands which arose in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Hovering in the spectral shadows of Go! Team is the ancestral presence of cult British producer Joe Meek.

Pow! And it’s Pop Rap going back to original Old-Skool Hip-Hop like, say Funky Four + 1. It’s bright and sparkles and regularly switches pace and tempo. The Disco dance end of original Rap.

A Bee Without It’s Sting. Now this is beautiful honey with a sting. The dance of the bees. An irresistible hook-laden song with a Go-Go’s style of singing. The vocals are more texture than individualistic, or bombastic and over-emoting. This is pitching head and feet into the classic Girl Group music from Gold Star studios and the Wall of Sound.

Bruce Springsteen has this in the deepest part of his soul. However much he would yearn to recreate this with Born to Run and She’s the One, he acknowledged that the special power of that music came from teenage angst and lust. LaLa Brook’s lead vocal on the Crystal’s Then He Kissed Me.

Parton recruited young teen singers from Detroit on this and a few other songs on the album.

Tame the Great Plains is a fantastic instrumental. It sounds like simple elements have been combined to create a Pop Ska classic. Effortlessly lifts off and transports you. Could be a bedroom or a dance floor. Immediately gets put on a couple of my personal play-lists.

World Remember Me Now. Wakes you up with an old-fashioned alarm. Baby it’s just another day/ If there’s another way. Kettle drums pop up in the mix. The Soweto Pop Afro-Beat also borrowed by the Paul Simon of Graceland.

Obsessed by melody and the songwriter is the king. The album is easy to enter. But it’s real treasures are revealed over time.

Rev Orange Peel