Three Imaginary Girls

Seattle's Indie-Pop Press – Music Reviews, Film Reviews, and Big Fun

On their debut full-length, Brighton, UK's the Go! Team do the freak from genre to genre, swallowing musical styles — Swinging London mod pop, early New York hip-hop, 70's tv theme songs — and spitting them back out, where they glisten with the band's mash-up aesthetic. Sure, it gets a little sloppy, and if that makes you slip on the dance floor, well, just say you invented a new breakdance move.

Plenty of other bands from Stereolab to St. Etienne have made careers out of building blended sonic monuments to past styles, but the Go! Team has found a fresh way to connect the disparate dots of junk culture: musical sleight of hand. The lo-fi fuzz of the band's energetic live sound blurs the distinction between what's sampled and what's played live. As the six-piece collective {equal parts boy and girl} gets hyper, a distorted call to "rock the microphone" could just as easily be a boast from Go! Team vocalist Ninja as a loop from an old Sequence record — making Thunder, Lightning, Strike both theirs and {not} theirs at the same time.

The record bursts with the kind of creativity where accident meets intention and homage meets invention. Shangri-La's-meet-L'Trimm single "Ladyflash" is a giddy dance number that hop-scotches between girl group melodies and double-dutch rhythms. "Junior Kickstart" grafts a cop show instrumental over a homemade disco beat and some of the messiest tambourine playing ever recorded. The peppy piano of "Feelgood by Numbers" sounds like it's lifted straight from the soundtrack to a long-lost Peanuts cartoon special: check Woodstock struggling under the weight of DJ Snoopy's massive crate of Burt Bachrach, Ladytron, and Roxanne Shanté records. "It's Indie Electronic Night, Charlie Brown!"