Being a North American fan of the Go! Team takes considerable dedication.
To begin with, the Brighton sextet's debut album, Lightning, Thunder, Strike, has yet to turn up on these shores in anything other than import form - and won't for some time, since the final touches are still being put on a major label deal. When the sample-heavy disc does arrive here, U.S. copyright laws will conspire to ensure it won't be quite the same one that's been drawing raves online and overseas.
Then there's the challenge of following what amounts, more or less, to two different acts. On the album, what we're hearing is Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton fusing together such a diverse array of obscure samples and instrumentation that it defies any attempts to attach a genre label. But live, it's a whole other entity - six musicians, including two drummers and a vocalist who went nowhere near the studio, blasting out wildly up-tempo versions of the songs heard on the album.
Following all this requires enough time and energy that it's a wonder the Go! Team has appealed to anyone beyond the most rabid music geeks. And yet, mostly on the strength of Internet chatter and a much-lauded set at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, the Go! Team has so much buzz that its first-ever Canadian gig - tonight at Toronto's Lee's Palace - has emerged as one of the most coveted tickets of the summer.
"It's really quite localized to Toronto, for some reason," Parton says over the phone from home, where he's packing for the band's North American foray. "I don't know why. There's kind of pockets of interest around America, but if we played anywhere just outside a city or something, there'd be literally no one there."
The buzz has built fairly unconventionally in the U.K. as well. "We haven't really had any advertising budget, so it's kind of a slow drip effect," Parton says. Nor has the band benefited from the media hype that usually drives British acts. "NME gave us a nine out of 10 in the album review and have now gone kind of quiet on us, because we're not an NME kind of band," he says.
Parton credits the likes of Pitchfork Media and music blogs for spreading the gospel. But if it's online chatter that's helped move things along, that buzz has been driven by the instrument-swapping collective's frenetic live performances - particularly the work of energetic frontwoman Ninja, a rapper joyfully incongruous with the indie band behind her.
Not that the success of the live act, which Parton put together to tour the album once principal work on it had been completed, will have much bearing on the next release. While he acknowledges some of the other members might find their way to the studio this time, he mostly hopes the band's evolution will see him doing more of what he did the first time.
"I'm trying to make it more extreme, if anything, where you're referencing things even further apart," Parton says of the follow-up. "I think there's so much mileage in that kind of idea, where you're jelling wildly different things together.
"Hopefully that doesn't sound gimmicky or anything. But I think it kind of works."
