GoGo Penguin

One Liner: Jazzy piano beat-focused instrumentals (is a phrase I never knew I'd write)

Wikipedia Genre: Jazz, Electronica, trip hop
Home: Manchester, England

Poster Position: ? (early announcement)
Day: ?
Both Weekends.

Thoughts: What in the world is this one?  I mean, three songs into their top ten, its actually pretty dope stuff.  Like someone kidnapped George Winston, made him smoke a bunch of weed, and then got him to jam out over a drummer playing live break beats intended for a rapper.  You honestly have to hear this to understand.

Here is their top track, "Hopopono," with 7.1 million streams.

Reminds me a little of those Bad Bad Not Good guys from a few years ago - I need Ghostface Killah to jump in and start freestyling over the top of this about getting a BJ in a mountain of coke while eating a hoagie.  It's really good.  (and I start to hear the Peanuts theme in there after a little while).

TINY DESK MOFOS!!!

The piano players facial hair is a crime against humanity.  Like, come on, man.  Tiny Desk is forever, bro.  Again, though, this is damn pretty stuff - very technical and dense action that draws me in and I want to complete.  A lot of repetition, like they get into a groove where the piano keeps repeating the same phrase, and the other two just hold the groove steady, and you get to just slide along in that groove for a minute before they shift into something else.  Cool stuff.

I gotta say that the name threw me off though - was definitely expecting something different than modern jazz with a name like GoGo Penguin.  This is how they describe the origin: "Me and my mate Pete got drunk at the rag-week auction at the RNCM and Pete bought this weird looking stuffed penguin for £60. His girlfriend was terrified of it and wouldn’t have it in the house, so I put it up in mine. We got our first gig at Sandbar in Manchester and desperately needed a name, so we started throwing ideas about and the penguin telepathically gave us the solution. Hence ‘Penguin’, ‘Go Penguin’ and eventually ‘Gogo Penguin’."  So many things to unpack in that response.  WTF is a rag-week auction?  And isn't sixty pounds like $100?  That seems like a lot to spend on a terrifying penguin.

They name a bunch of very odd influences (although who am I to say they are odd, if they had listened to a bunch of REM and Zeppelin and Beasties, they wouldn't be making this cool music today): Aphex Twin, Mu-Ziq, Four Tet, Ustad Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain, Bonobo, Acoustic Ladyland, Radiohead, Polar Bear, Portishead, Lamb, Scuba, Burial, and Björk.  I've heard of four of those before.  But they turn it into something wildly expressive and interesting.

Four albums, and you can use them to hear an evolution from a more straight-forward jazz sound to their more experimental edge now.  The debut, 2012's Fanfares, has one track with more than 400k streams, "Last Words," with 439k.

God, I bet making that video took 9 years.  Lovely track though - hard to find fault with any of these songs - these guys are really great with their instruments.  But you can tell on there that, while they are using drums to make some fast-paced beats under all the piano, they aren't making a quasi hip hop track like now.  v2.0, their 2014 album has some crazy jams on it, like that first video I posted above, and then "Garden Dog Barbeque."

I mean, I can dig it.  I'm not at all sure what a live show from these guys would look like, in a festival setting, but depending on the schedule, I'd be willing to check it out.  Someone pass the mushrooms and lets groooooooooove.