The Go! Team

Proof of Youth

Sub Pop

originally published October 3, 2007

Lord knows I'm no audiophile, but the Go! Team seems like some sort of line in the sand. The distortion on the group's first album was natural enough due to the samples being used and the bedroom-recording techniques available, but on Proof of Youth, you honestly can't tell whether you're listening to low-quality MP3s or your speakers are crapping out or they just meant to make their album sound like something's gone horribly wrong at the mastering plant. Distortion for distortion's sake, it's not a lemonade-out-of-lemons thing that creates interesting new sounds, but just an "indie!" preset punched in resignation. The distortion here is the haze of nostalgia, the sound of fourth-generation cassettes imposed on 21st-century listeners, and it's horrifying.

It doesn't help that, in contrast to the mixed bag of Thunder, Lightning, Strike!, there are now no good songs, with one instrumental called "My World" actually sounding like Madonna's awful country-house single "Don't Tell Me." It's all impressive in a Ren-Faire kinda way - wow, that really does sound like the Ski Patrol soundtrack played through a RadioShack tape player! - but there are no giant turkey legs or dunkings to be found. Most criminally, lead vocalist Ninja, the Go! Team's one significant addition since its debut, is lost here, with the charisma she so readily displays in concert buried in a haze of midrange yuck. That people who actually lived through the '90s are embracing this with open arms just shows that it's (seriously) time to move on.

Michael Barthel