The Go! Team - Rolling Blackouts

The Go! Team are all about bringing the party, theirs is music to dance to. And I don't mean dance well, I mean dance like an epileptic Peter Crouch coked up to his eyeballs and standing under a strobe light. The Brighton sextet's latest effort, Rolling Blackouts is their third, and continues to bring together old-school New York hip-hop, live indie guitars, and brash 70s soul horns, with a childish sense of fun.

High Points

Go! Team songwriter Ian Parton has described Rolling Blackouts as "schizo music", and there's certainly a lot going on in these tracks. Each one multi-layered, packed with samples and found sounds, nonsense rapping and double-dutch style chants. In fact there's so much going on that it's difficult to get a handle on individual tracks.

Voice Yr Choice and the presumably political (it's hard to be sure) Buy Nothing Day, featuring Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino are decent, if schizophrenic, pop tracks. But only The Running Range really sticks out as something approaching a normal song, which makes it instantly the best thing on the record.

The Verdict

Much like the album artwork, Rolling Blackouts is a vibrant tapestry of an album, consisting of many different parts stitched together to form a rather incoherent hodgepodge of a record. I don't think I can sum the album up better than saying it sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly frenetic, yet vacuous episode of Skins.

Final Score: 55%