Rolling Blackouts

Rolling Blackouts features less of lady rapper Ninja's double-dutch rhymes and a wrecking-ball brass attack, a welcome evolution that shifts the focus towards songcraft and away from the squealing sheets of instrumentation.

If the Go! Team can make a record this much fun, with this much style and skill, with this many well-chosen collaborators, and with this many hit songs every couple years, by the time they are done we'll be voting them into the Brilliant Pop Hall of Fame.

One has to applaud The Go! Team for their restless energy and dogged determination to stick to a previously tried and true formula, but Rolling Blackouts proves that louder and faster in no way equals hip.

This album is pure joy to listen to. [Mar 2011, p.96]

Much like "T.O.R.N.A.D.O.," Rolling Blackouts is a natural disaster in musical form-a messy, lo-fi garbage bag full of genres and cultures, overflowing with left-field sonic trickery: corny turntable scratching, shit garage drums, twinkling glockenspiels, and enough spunky cheerleader bravado from frontgirl/rapper Ninja to start a whole squad.

The Go! Team makes sure to reach for the stars and they're certainly poised to simply get more well-known from here.

Rolling Blackouts is a Technicolor, kaleidoscopic riot of a record but, put in context, it can't fail to be tinged with a hint of disappointment. There's a real risk that The Go! Team may have painted themselves into a corner (albeit with various shades of eye-wateringly luminous paint); it will be intriguing to see where they go from here.

Rolling Blackouts is as invigorating as their debut. [Feb 2011, p.87]

Rolling Blackouts doesn't move away from what the Go! Team is known for. Instead, this is a snapshot of a band both honing their skills and creating a fun piece of music.

A sample-heavy hodgepodge of indie rock, hip-hop, garage rock and mature instrumentals fills out the rest of this joyous album whose almost wistful title track near the end brings everything together in the most satisfying way.

Rolling Blackouts sees them doing what The Go! Team do: flailing and yelping like meth-addicted Energiser bunnies, which, as you may have figured, is not a compliment.

Whether you felt the Go! Team took a step back with Proof of Youth or not, Rolling Blackouts as an album delivers on the band's premise more successfully thanks to this variety.

Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.

The prominence of structure beams through and makes this more of a traditional offering than a novelty. Still unlike anything else, this is time well spent.

Lively third outing from Brighton collective. [Feb. 2011, p. 117]

It's mixed-up, mashed-up and flagrantly, unapologetically odd. It's everything we want The Go! Team to be. But with added extras.

The Go! Team still has spirit, yes it does, and with Rolling Blackouts, it's given fans of ecstatic pop one more thing to cheer about.

The naïve exuberance underpinning their mash-up of marching-band funk, jump-rope rap chants and indie-pop could feel forced by now, but their third disc is as cute and tunefully muscular as ever.

Right at the end of what is officially the most depressing month of the year comes a shaft of unadulterated sunshine.

Rolling Blackouts eventually circles around to the type of funky, percussive stuff that the Go! Team does best, though not before detouring through a few instrumentals-typically a mixed bag for the band, and no less so on this album.

Rolling Blackouts' essential problem is that The Go! Team has not found one meaningful way to evolve their sound past their critical-darling debut.

There's still the charm and energy and all the qualities that made us fall in love with The Go! Team in the first place. But it's like a child who's recently learned one song: cute the first few times, but even the most lovable things eventually get tiresome.

Rolling Blackouts, is a breathless mix of scrappy guitars, girl-group harmonies, and funky horns. It might seem nostalgic if it didn't sound so now.

Ian Parton is capable of more, and his poor decisions and lack of forward-thinking will keep The Go! Team from being more than a great live act unless change is sought for their next record.

Their diverse third release occasionally finds new ways to induce grins.

It works from top to bottom, to take songs from, and it fits the Go! Team canon with assumed confidence.

Six years is a long time in pop, and the Go! Team seem to have grown old.