Rolling Blackouts

The Go! Team’s latest offering to us thrill-seekers is a fast-paced joyride of an album, crashing through your speakers. Go! Team’s unique and now famous blend of old-school hip-hop and raucous pop – with the usual mixture of ecstatic chanting, bright keyboard, distorted guitar and Ninja’s rapping is once again uplifitinlgy presented on _Rolling Blackouts_.

That, however is the problem: the band’s claim of progression and new schizophrenic approach to pop music, aswell as the long creative period which preceded the record have been sadly unfulfilled. _Rolling Blackouts_ is exactly what we all could have predicted, it’s those same old elements of old school hip-hop, aggressive funk, and blissful noise playing over again.

Though the exclamation mark in Go! Team’s name is justly deserved – they have more ‘Go’ than P!ATD ever had ‘Panic’ – it’s just a shame that in two records they haven’t progressed or attempted to deviate from their now seemingly unmatchable debut _Thunder Lightning Strike_.

Lead single from _Blackouts_, ‘T.O.R.N.A.D.O’, is still a fantastic bit of 1000mph off-your-rocker pop, and does exactly what band leader Ian Parton hoped: it reclaims the trumpet for pop music from Mark Ronson’s overused goodtime inanities; but the disappointing lack of adventure which dominates one’s feelings when listening to _Rolling Blackouts_ is a considerable disappointment when Go! Team are a band whose legacy is forged on hitting the audience with the unexpected. With this safe, and uninventive approach _Rolling Blackouts_ instead of blowing your mind as the Go! Team once did, just washes over you, albeit pleasantly.