Nearly two decades and five albums along, the ear-ringing sugar buzz that energized a generation of previously fun-averse indie fans still hums through the Go! Team. Helmed by Brighton’s Ian Parton, the Go! Team suggested that there was a place where meticulous beatmakers like the Avalanches could find common cause with JV cheerleaders. But as the decade wore on, they seemed unable to move far beyond Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their 2004 debut. The original version of the band dissolved and 2015’s The Scene Between found Parton scaling things back to just himself.
With Semicircle, Parton again opens up the project’s parameters, even bringing back the rapper Ninja and original guitarist Sam Dook. Rather than replicate the group chants that made their songs so boisterous, Parton instead made a pilgrimage to the Motor City and enlisted the Detroit Youth Choir to sing backup on the album. Across Semicircle’s 12 tracks, a sense of time slippage occurs: In 2018, the Go! Team sound much like they did back in 2004, all while retaining a fervent enthusiasm for the sounds of the 1960s. The album teems with girl-group bubblegum, giddy cheers, and peppy drums reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. “The Answer’s No - Now What’s the Question” could be mistaken for a cut from the One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set. But this isn’t exactly fresh terrain; Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Frankie Rose all mined the same seam, often to edgier effect, in the mid 2000s.
Not that Parton doesn’t add a few new wrinkles to the template. On the rowdy “All the Way Live,” one of the album’s standouts, he sets a rap lifted from a 1983 single against a bright backdrop of marching drums, clanging bells, and shout-along chorus. And Ninja’s return for “She’s Got Guns” finds the rapper matching the swagger of the old-school beat. But when Parton returns to ’60s tropes, they go stale. Having band members shout out their astrological signs on “Semicircle Song” feels quaint in an age of social-media oversharing. The dusty AM pop fluff of “Chico’s Radical Decade” is anything but.
Exuberance and positivity, qualities sorely in need these days, have been the Go! Team’s defining characteristics since their debut. And opener “Mayday,” with its shouts and Morse-code tattoos, delivers a much-needed shot of adrenaline, though a san of the lyrics reveal it’s not about an actual state of emergency, just a girl with “only a heartache to hold me tight.” Which isn’t to say that all pop pleasures need align themselves with the issues of the day, but it sounds willfully heedless for Parton—himself operating under the cloud of a pending Brexit—to decamp to Middle America and then make his hired locals shout “Mayday!” After five albums, it’s nostalgic sleight-of-hand for the Go! Team to continually look back on the sounds of the ’60s yet still tune out the underlying noise of that radical decade.
