The Go! Team: Proof of Youth : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This second piece of exuberant Brighton Brit-hop begins by resurrecting the great lost shorties Lisa Lee and Sha Rock, of the early hip-hop crews Cosmic Force and Funky Four Plus One, respectively, as resident genius Ian Parton folds their 1984 BBC cameos into a typically jammed-up track that's rife with trebly guitars and spiked by a four-man horn section. “Grip Like a Vice” is such a stroke that this auspicious follow-up album never tops it, hotter and louder than the auspicious debut though it may be. Still, it's the rare band that can switch from sampled music to live with no loss in riffage as they do here, and the almost-famous names who hitch themselves to Ninja's vocals do themselves a solid. Favela funkster Marina Vello commits “Titanic Vandalism.” Elizabeth Esselink makes like her one-woman electro act Solex is a girl group. And Chuck D definitely knows what he's rapping about.