10 Records of 2015: The Go! Team's The Scene Between

For all my attempts to expand my musical horizons over the last few years, my spirit genre remains indiepop. Perhaps it will always be thus; I feel a weird affinity for a certain set of sounds — or perhaps its more a relationship between sounds — that can still seduce me wherever they arise. The Go! Team had already explored this territory as part of the more multi-faceted retro fantasia of their previous albums (Rolling Blackouts’ ‘Buy Nothing Day’ and ‘Secretary Song’ are obvious precedents) but on The Scene Between, they’ve gone full twee. For me, the result is nine achingly poignant time capsules from my fantasy adolescence (a parallel universe that can be loosely dated around 10 years before my actual adolescence; it opened up around the time I first saw Donnie Darko in 2002, and collapsed in on itself around the time I saw the Pixies play Reading in 2005).

The Scene Between is a panorama of perfect structures. While the vocalist, instrumental forces and stylistic touchstones vary from track to track, the ubiquitous wall-of-sound production makes each self-contained construction seem to stretch away towards a single horizon. I’ve previously described the Go! Team’s distinct production style as a kind of mediating device — the equivalent of radio crackle or the frame of a television screen — which presents all of their channel-hopping transmissions as emanating from the same fantasy source. However, the application of this device on The Scene Between feels less knowing; rather than just acting as the glitter glue in a retro scrapbook, its primary role is in removing some of the personality from the individual songs, and helping them to appear outside of history and authorship.

Ten Favourite Albums of 2011

New Year is actually my favourite time of the musical year by far. I'm perenially propelled through midwinter on an avalanche of new music, aggregated from the year-end lists of all those many bloggers who've had better (or less scrupulous) access to more albums throughout the past year. Yet before I begin my annual attempt to soak up as much as I can of the good stuff that has dripped through my fingers, I still want to talk about my ten favourite albums of the year (especially since I'm bound to start regretting my decisions as soon as I sink properly into my January playlists).

As tends to happen when I compare my lists with those of more full-time bloggers, some of the space usually reserved for zeitgeist-definingly new stuff has been given over to exceptional new offerings from some of my favourite old stalwarts - the kind of album that Pitchfork will acknowledge gladly as an addition to an established band's existing oeuvre, but then overlook around list-time. Still, these ten weren't too difficult to assemble, since between them they easily demanded the majority of my aural attention as the year proceeded.

Postmodernism as Topic #2: The Go! Team Listen To Yr Childhood

I belatedly return to a subject that I embarked upon a while ago in reference to Deerhoof’s new record Deerhoof vs. Evil, which is an exploration of postmodern practices and concerns as the topic, not just the aesthetic or process, of pop music. The Go! Team, whose 2011 album Rolling Blackouts is quite possibly their best yet, have self-consciously crafted an unmistakable signature sound, yet their approach goes further than that. At many levels, the Go! Team represent the postmodern age, through postmodern means (form as well as content), referencing other postmodern media in a thoroughly postmodern game of signification. Just a cursory listen to Rolling Blackouts could demonstrate several layers on which the tenets of postmodernism are being addressed as well as merely inhabited. The main ones that I want to discuss are: the creation of a sonic ‘frame’ through which a ‘listening’ to the early 90s is pre-mediated, and a direct engagement with the musical language and cultural meanings of TV theme tunes.