Search - The Go! Team :: Thunder Lightning Strike

An overlooked unique sound - Another great one!

Bill Stella | Somerville, NJ USA | 09/19/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Track 5 on "Thunder, Lightning, Strike", "Get It Together" is the hit theme song to a hit TV show that hasn't been made yet and doesn't yet realize it's the perfect song for them. Until then, it's a perfectly bright, mood-enhancing, some might say Power Song, inevitably annoying when you just want to be left alone to stew in one's own crap, but you just can't stop hearing it everywhere.



But it isn't everywhere -- yet.



Get into it before someone you hate buys the rights to associate it with their product and ruins it for you.



And the entire album extends that good feeling. I imagine myself running around the yard with kids to this album. I imagine myself joining the coolest cheerleading team ever to dance to this album -- and I usually hate the idea of myself cheerleading. I imagine every minute I listen to this album is another minute banishing gloom from my life.



Where the heck's the buzz for a work as positive and genuine and accessible as this???



People I talk to keep complaining about how everything they hear sounds the same, but almost no one goes out of their way EVEN JUST A LITTLE to find great stuff by folks making new, exciting POP MUSIC like the Go! Team. This album still has time to prove itself in the marketplace in the US, although it has been around a long while in the UK, but The Go! Team are just one of dozens of artists releasing albums in the last few years that have hit the proverbial wall in terms of the tight control very few channels (distribution, media, labels) have on music. It's not James Joyce, people, but neither is it the bland crap people buy because they only put money down for what they're sold; they only get what they're told to.



Saying that will probably cost me points from people rating this review, but I'm frustrated by the amount of hype it takes to get people to think something is any good. Folks won't change their habits, and put most of their hard earned dollars into the same-stuff-different-day, all the while complaining about the very system they perpetuate.



Meanwhile, most of you are missing great fun stuff like Go! Team, and Michael Franti, The Decemberists, Ben Lee, OK Go, Art Brut, Bob Mould, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, The Blue Van, The BellRays, Pansy Division, The Raveonettes, Silversun Pickups, Bouncing Souls, Girlyman, Disappear Fear, The Bobbleheads, Willy Mason, Bright Eyes, Coheed & Cambria, Louis XIV (y'all will probably come to know those last three sooner rather than later), Matisyahu, Gogol Bordello, Architecture In Helsinki, and even the latest by Garbage. Among others: I'm just scratching the surface here. (While we're on variety, don't get hung up on the variety of genres represented in that list - it's all -- well, I was gonna say Hits Radio-friendly, but hits radio has been nothing but hostile to anything not already pre-sold and pre-digested, for that matter, for decades.) There's so much great music out there ignored by the powers that be, so you gotta find it yourself.



Don't wait to be sold. The old paradigms are over. You can find out about great music without dealing with media who have lost your trust. Go to bands' websites. (Start with those listed, perhaps.) Listen online to alternative media (I recommend a search on "altrockradio", but there are many others.)"