Throwing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the boom box and tromping around, only half listening to it would be akin to musical heresy. But different artists require different media of listening and The Go! Team, particularly with their sophomore effort Proof of Youth, have established themselves as of the boom box variety. In fact, if you were to sit down with those Bose headphones and listen to Proof of Youth with a critical ear, you’d probably deem it pretty mediocre. Play it through a boom box and half-listen to it while dancing with 50 of your closest friends and it suddenly becomes an album worth keeping.
Thunder, Lightening, Strike (TLS), the Team’s debut, stands up well to the headphone test. The album’s kinetic energy comes from the interplay of tightly woven instrumental elements, whether sharp percussion punctuated with incessant cymbals or driving guitar riffs that sporadically give way to harmonica and flute melodies.
Unfortunately, on Proof of Youth the Team attempted to create songs that embody both a verse-chorus-verse song structure and an instrumental ball of energy. The opener, “Grip Like A Vice,” begins with promise, seeming to build upon TLS with a smoother, more complex arrangement; suddenly, however, the instrumentation becomes a backdrop for mediocre, overly enthusiastic rap. Furthermore, throughout most of the album’s tracks, the always-present vocals clash rhythmically and tonally with the instrumentation, rather than complement it as in TLS.
Ironically, Proof of Youth’s greatest structural flaw is that it adheres to a structure. This renders the album fatal for headphones, but you could throw it on the boom box in a heartbeat.
