Review Summary: For Tomorrow: A Guide to Contemporary British Music, 1988-2013 (Part 82)
Throwing an exclamation point in your band’s name breeds a certain set of high expectations. If you dare utilize the peppiest of the punctuation in your moniker, you’re almost guaranteed to be an of the moment flash of hype and style that fizzles out within a few years (WHAM!, !!!, Panic! At the Disco). Honestly, The Go! Team could have used a few more exclamation points. If anyone could have pulled off the band name !!!, it was these guys. Their debut
Thunder Lightning Strike is such an irrepressible railgun of fun that they could have called it
Thunder! Lightning! Strike! and I wouldn’t have blinked.
Thunder Lightning Strike is nostalgic without being weighed down by it. It’s not a forlorn sigh of “Things were so great back then”, but an exuberant yelp of “Things were so great back then!” Specifically,
Thunder Lightning Strike is an American inner city child's late-spring school day sometime in the late 1980s. Colorful cereal in the morning, J.J. Fad and Salt n Pepa on the radio, educational videotape during the day, recess, Sesame Street after school, and The A-Team at prime time. Copyright law hadn’t crushed sampling yet,
Paul’s Boutique and
3 Feet High and Rising were fresh on record store shelves.
Really, The A-Team was never better than its intro. About 100% of everything that was iconic about the show was all in that first minute and a half. The back story, the problem no one can solve, shooting up the logo, car flips, dinosaur suits, strafing helicopters, and, most importantly, that theme song, composed by Mike Post. Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton recognizes Mike Post’s contribution to the A-Team and, with opener “Panther Dash”, improves it to perfection. “Panther Dash” is the screaming guitars, wailing harmonica, blasting horns, and thunderous drums, all mixed comfortably into the red, you’ve been waiting for to soundtrack the 80s action intro of your dreams. You will powerslide old Cadillacs. You will punch the leader of an international drug cartel in the face. You will detonate massive explosions and laugh. You will put on Ray-Bans in slow motion. And for the short two minutes and fifty seconds“Panther Dash” is on, you will be transported out of your world and into one of bloodless violence and freeze frame high fives.
So
Thunder Lightning Strike sets the bar impossibly high with “Panther Dash”, and it really never tops that opening salvo, but it does manage to hover there for “Ladyflash”. An infectiously wonderful piece of music that sounds like six radio stations worth of hooks set to a drummer having the time of his life in the next room, peaking with an out of nowhere flute solo that hits like the sweetest ray of summer sunshine.
The Go! Team sets themselves apart from other sampladelic-ers like The Avalanches by maintaining a palpable live band feel. No matter how many samples Parton tosses into the mix, just about every track on
Thunder Lightning Strike sounds like a room full of friends that just got back from a flea market with a truckload of new-old instruments. “Feelgood by Numbers” rolls along a “Linus and Lucy” piano line while “Get it Together” will make you wish you had hung onto your 5th grade recorder. Above all else though, is the drums.
Thunder Lightning Strike truly captures the elemental joy of just bashing away at a drum kit in your basement, finese be damned. That primal smacking gives the twin cheerleader chants “The Power is On” and “Huddle Formation” an extra dose of oomph, the former gives the ride cymbal a good thrashing while the latter, in lieu of a high-hat, goes to town on the rim of the snare drum. Only once do the drums take a break, for the album’s brief rest stop trip to high-five Moe Tucker on “Hold Yr Terror Close”.
Thunder Lightning Strike opens and closes perfectly. Grand finale (and it really is grand) “Everyone’s a V.I.P. to Someone” is a stunningly gorgeous sunset, packing a last-day-of-summer-camp wistfulness so potent the rest of the album is reflected in it like an old memory. A plinking banjo gives way to a sweeping rush of strings and a harmonica that sounds like a good friend letting you rest your head on his shoulder. Then, just when it sounds like everyone is about to burst into tears, the drums come rushing up from behind to scoop you onto their shoulders with a sudden rush of energy that, coupled with another huge swell of strings, topples “Everyone’s a V.I.P. to Someone” into something overpowering. If there was any justice in the world, it would replace that lousy Vitamin C song at every graduation from now until everyone who was born in the 80s was dead.
The Go! Team made refinements and tweaks to the sound of
Thunder Lightning Strike but they never improved upon it. That’s not a slight on Ian Parton though, there’s just nowhere else to take a sound once you’ve perfected it. If nothing else it makes yet another case that American sampling laws need serious revision if works of art like this are such a pain in the ass to get here (it was eventually issued in the US with some samples swapped for re-recordings). There’s nothing out there that sounds quite like
Thunder Lightning Strike and once you own it you won’t know how you made it through a summer without it.
