Buster Shuffle – Go Steady

By RingMaster Review on April 20, 2022 • ( 0 )

Though not known for eagerly hitting the dance floor even our inhibition loaded bodies have not been able to resist the contagion of BUSTER SHUFFLE over recent years and once more breathlessness has descended courtesy of the Londoners’ romping stomping new offering, Go Steady. The album is another collection of tracks driven by fun and mischief and crafted in a sound which is as dextrous as it is devilish.

The successor to acclaim loaded I’ll Take What I Want, the greedily infectious Go Steady is an adventure which the band turned to fan power to crowd fund. Support was swift and full and subsequently rewarded with a set of tracks that joyfully treat the listener as a plaything and puppet whilst filling them with the most rousing and enlivening sounds. No surprise that their fifth studio album is crafted in the band’s distinctive ska punk/”rockney” sound but the only moment expectations get a look in as the quartet uncage their broadest slab of rock ‘n’ roll yet.

Fun and a customary rumination on an aspect of life immediately sweeps ears as album opener, Deadline, strolls in with creative arrogance and swift contagion. As rhythms snap and riffs coax, keys flirt, the fingers of Jet Baker as involving as his London Town bred tones. It all makes for an orchestration of feet, hips and vocal chords, that another expectation we have come to see fulfilled by a Buster Shuffle encounter.

Similarly, the album’s following title track is soon manipulating body and throat with its even more eager and frenetic invasion. A ska punk party in the ear, the song swept through the body with virulent hunger, setting up an already exhausted host for the following ska antics of Puke In The Duke. Rapaciously catchy sounds, lyrical fertility and grinning mischief are in constant collusion within the band’s tracks and in gleeful embrace within the crisply swung, flirtatiously cast song.

The boogie woogie flushed This City Is Ours allows no let up on feet, its urgent burst of rock ‘n’ roll as insatiable as our swift addiction. It is a slice of enterprise designed to steer bodies across any dancehall, so prime Buster Shuffle embracing the band’s fresh vitality and adventure in sound while The Hood is a romance lit summer stroll through joyful times which is as galvanic on spirit as ears and as exploiting of instincts as its predecessor.

Fifties rock ‘n’ roll seeds certain traits of next up Wipe Your Nose, its rocky romance akin to a mix of Gene Vincent and Rocket from the Crypt consumed in Buster Shuffle ingenuity. It proved another irrepressible enslavement before New Badge For My Uniform, evoking equally eager participation, uncaged its own feral rock and ska punk forged antics. Defiance and dispute soaks its breath, infectiousness its creativity to induce yet another personal holler alongside its own rock uproar.

In turn, In History I Still Have You is pure captivation, a carnival of ska and ardour with a seaside like air to its sideshow of invention; a richness of temptation matched by that thrust through ears by Head To Toes. With its calm but irrepressible sway and wickedly catchy vocal call, the track had bodies bouncing physically and spiritually in no time and with increasing lust though allowing enough energy to be held back to leap upon the boisterously frisky and increasingly rampant album closer, Sucker Punch Blues. Summing up the guile, energy and passion of Go Steady in barely passing three minutes, it is one seriously rousing conclusion to one galvanic encounter.

Go Steady is Buster Shuffle bringing fun and escape to times which increasingly lean to the dark but also an encounter proving what a creatively cunning and jubilantly irresistible proposition they are.

Go Steady is out now on the band’s own Do Nothing Records; available @ https://bustershufflemusic.shop/collections/crowdfunding-items