Semicircle

The big takeaways from the equally big Semicircle are 1) the Go! Team are back and better than ever and 2) the Go! Team never really left.

Semicircle touches on elements of the socially aware and a-woke with old-fashioned message-driven songs. [No. 150, p.56]

Parton has managed to create an album that very much sounds like his previous work but expands the emotional canvas he's working with. It is a fantastic little album with exactly the sort of youthful, innocent drive that you just don't get from artists well into middle age.

Semicircle is enthusiastic and a little rough around the edges, although this is absolutely intentional.

As Getting Back Up rides out the album on the back of some more glorious brass melodies, it proves that not many make pop music that leaps off the page so high and vividly as The Go! Team.

The result is another eclectic, iconoclastic record that doesn't sound like anything else happening in the world. That the Go! Team can sound as fresh and inventive on Semicircle as they did when they started is an impressive, almost miraculous, feat that defies nature and defines triumphant joy.

The Go! Team’s Semicircle may not be unbroken, but they’re definitely coming back around hard.

Parton’s eclectic tastes remain the beating heart of The Go! Team, but in producing a record genuinely representative of the band’s boisterous live shows, he sounds more revitalised than ever.

Wherever you turn, exuberance and invention are generously served.

Since they’ve never really been able to top 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, that means that everything on Semicircle is fun, but not much of it is super fun. It’s kind of like going a field trip; technically you’re not at school, but it’s still school.

Semicircle manages to reconnect the group with the childish creativity that powers their best work.

Despite this influx of collaborative talent, things sound largely the same on this album, but with a project as reliable as the Go! Team, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Brighton six-piece The Go Team! imbue Semicircle with the high-octane vibes of a marching band taking on block party jams, Northern Soul and cutesy indie pop. It might sound crazy, but it works beautifully.

It’s a rousing party record, but when the music stops and the lights come on, it all blurs together into a fun but forgettable time.

Their music works best when left to freewheel across genre and structure. That doesn't always happen here, which is why this fifth outing is merely enjoyable, not up there touching the sublime as Parton and his merry crew have offered before.

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.

Overall, whilst Semicircle does contain obvious flaws, this chapter of The Go! Team is here to have a good time and hopes you are too. And who can knock them for that?

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

Semicircle won’t seem like a giant leap for the band but is yet another upbeat, buoyant addition to their canon, injected with an even greater sense of community spirit.

For this latest incarnation of The Go! Team, bandleader Ian Parton has doubled down on the street-beat cheerleader mash-up mode of earlier albums like Proof Of Youth by searching out an actual youth choir from Detroit to accompany the marching-band-style brass that drives Semicircle. This works brilliantly on “Mayday”, an anthemic lament for love signals ignored, with the ebullient brass and chanted vocals evoking street parades, and “Semicircle Song”, in which the staccato brass lines interlace like a proper New Orleans marching band.

Cumulatively, the brassy blare and breakbeats are like Dayglo plasticine, now merging into an paterfamilias brown ball. [Feb 2018, p.27]

The instrumental smorgasbord can feel a little claustrophobic, as on the clattering All The Way Live, but overall The Go! Team's relentless party vibe emerges undiminished. [Feb 2018, p.96]

Often the vocal melodies religiously, and simplistically, follow the melody of the lead instrument, leading to a lack of interesting melodic counterpoint and contrast, and, in almost all cases, they’re the kind of Sesame Street sing-songy melodies that no one over the age of five would unironically enjoy.

The nostalgia lacks anything close to the authenticity that Thunder, Lightning, Strike achieved, and the sound of the 2018 version of The Go! Team struggles to get anywhere far from persistent annoyance.