CRITICAL RAVES
“This stellar cd receives my approval to be added to the already legendary Global Goon catalog.”

“[a] journey into the bloody marvellous world of Johnny Hawk’s Global Goon.”

“Recommended listening.”

“...an enjoyable experience, filled with ass wiggling goofball jams”

“Dr. Synthenstein.....”

“...this release is quite top notch! Ace material Hawk!!”

“...gonna give this 10/10. This family is stuck together forever.”

“...this is what you ought to be getting excited about. Overall: 8.9/10”

“...family glue made my day. No my week. OK it made february. Top banana”

“This album is beautiful... (9/10)”

“...definitely the best Goon release to date... carves it’s own niche... i see a lot of kids rockin this on their i-pods on the subway...”

full reviews posted here

Global Goon : Family Glue
[boomkat] UK
Now given a wider released by those good folk at Audio-Dregs! Following on in the same spirit to the diet-breaks marinated electronica of 2002's 'Vatican Nitez', 'Family Glue' is a lambescent collection of bright-eyed beats and EFX that should serve to further remove him from the Aphex shadow, this time hopefully for good. Opening with a melody as infectious as bird-flu, first track 'Electrostatic Bonj De Lonj' is a sunshine on the back of the neck romp through plodding beats and bleeping 808's that even finds time for a squeeky Kanye vocal sample. A similar spring in your step feel is maintained on the tight and taught 'You Set My Face On Fire' wherein Gene Krupa precision beats are layered wrecklessly with disco-funk bass and some nimble fingered synth action that recalls Daft Punk in their pre-shit days, whilst 'Glory B' splatters a crate-full of fancy cut&paste vocal narratives all over a clattering breakbeat and vintage Bombjack arcade. Topping all this off is 'Friendship Never Dies', the best 1970's cop-funk soundtrack you've never heard and title track 'Family Glue' which sees some of the DFA mob trying to persuade Juan Maclean and Caribou to get with the slap-bass funk. Cute.

Global Goon : Family Glue
[indie workshop] USA
Audio Dregs snuck in a bunch of end-of-2k4 treats including this, the latest full-length from the mysterious entity known as Global Goon. It’s cool to see them releasing an album by one of their influences and someone they’ve always appreciated in their zine and the pairing delivers naturally pleasing results. Global Goon is still quite underground and overlooked by many, so this stateside release will definitely please new fans who weren’t fluent in the Rephlex catalogue in ’96. Johnny Hawk is still subject to word-of-mouth confusion due to his rooming with Aphex Twin’s Richard D. Young and the blurring of their separate identities. But not much prerequisite knowledge is necessary here for initiates, as this is great and fun electronic music to fuel the audio-stove at your winter dance parties.
With Family Glue Global Goon seems to give a tip of the hat to the “Audio Dregs Sound” of fun, creative, high-tech but human electronic beats and sound collages that put you in a good mood. The beats are relentlessly tight and funky and there doesn’t seem to be a second wasted or one that escapes Goon’s brilliantly syncopated and playful logic. He often samples his own voice, in a way that is funny but not goofy and soulfully layered and arranged. Usually this kind of thing annoys me, but the garbled samples and a capella vocoder choruses really take things truly over the top to make this a potential electro-pop classic.
For long-time fans a Global Goon release is cause for celebration and an immediate, no-brainer purchase. More casual electronic appreciators into Beck and Daft Punk and Mouse On Mars but nothing really insanely obscure would definitely dig this immediately. I can also see jam band heads of the Medeski Martin & Wood and DJ Logic ilk getting into this, as there’s lots of slide bass lines and acoustic funky drummer breaks, along with some more traditional organ parts. It’s like he scooped up the personnel for the Headhunters sessions or some 70’s Brazilian samba-soul band and dropped them off in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop studios to explore the computer-synths, modified oscillators and tape machines. It’s also like forcing a Prozac’d Boards of Canada onto the mat at a global Dance Dance Revolution summit for world peace and cranking up the bpm’s. You can easily visualize the Sims-like digital family of the sleeve artwork breaking it down. The beatless textures of the track “Pause” towards the end approaches Stockhausen territory, then things cool down in one more laid-back beat spa.
Like the title indicates this set of tracks is like a lot of good things glued together, but at the same time the resulting combination is truly unique. It’s relatively short listen, but just the right length and there are so many incredible details and great moments that will make you keep this on repeat. So pick this action up and turn that frown upside-down. -Andy Teft

Global Goon : Family Glue
[Igloo Mag] USA (01.14.05)
"...Family Glue is the noise of slippage when ambition gets lost and sheer joy of playing brings immaculate invention..."

As usual, the IDM-List is debating what IDM is, what went wrong, and all that. By custom I replied with my IDM has sucked for the last few years e-mail, then read similar comments on Philip Sherbourne's blog and a guest blogger for Sasha Frere-Jones. Anyway, all of this made me reconsider writing another here's a good IDM album despite all the crap out there to review.

Global Goon's Family Glue is a truly excellent repose of what IDM should and should not be, but the Goon CD came with a copy of E-Rock's Thumb Zine --a small press mag from the 90s, chock full of all the goodness IDM used to muster. Thumb contains all those early Morr Music releases that entranced us, plus Mouse on Mars, groups I'd never heard of, and reviews from everything from Mego to Consumers Research and Development. Some of those dudes became indie-ized and hence famous and others just released the same mediocre thing for 5 years and faded away. Electronic music might suffer from what Frere's friends call "social content or change" (i.e. it ain't got no culture or message it's putting forth), but what it really lacks is good exposure.

Family Glue could really convince some of the many Aphex clones out there to get it all back to songs. Goon knows how to play all sides of the IDM fence coating music that references IDM's clichés while transcending them simply by pushing all AFX/Pusher's song types, chewing them around for awhile, and making their characteristics his own. Consider Family Glue to be the good natured cousin steeped in his heritage, but twisting shit to his own drummer. A whimsy of exploration unseen in electronic music for years is accentuated by a 12 string bass that lets loose jazz-inflected sub-thumps that don't go all virtuous like Tom Jenkinson. Family Glue does what any good IDM does, it makes you wonder what type of music you're listening to. Genres become like Bubble Gum and Goon makes berry-licious, chocolate-mushroom flavored tunes that slack off so suddenly, their apathy to categorization is astonishing.

Not to press a point, but here's basically the deal here: Global Goon doesn't give a shit about being new, he just likes to make good tunes, and in turn somewhere down this Shepherd's road to music making, he fell out of IDM's stereotypes and liked that noise. Family Glue is the noise of slippage when ambition gets lost and sheer joy of playing brings immaculate invention. Gives 808s mouths and lets them toke up while Glue's signature track, "Dead Weird Keks," would be the soundtrack of our fair synth's stumbling rumble back home. A solid teenage spree of synthesizers gone wrong, history in the twisting, and pop music made new again.

Family Glue is out now on J-HOK Records as a CD release. It is also available domestically on Audio Dregs (with slightly different track titles) as CD/LP.
-Andrew Jones

Global Goon : Family Glue
[Grooves] USA
Operating at the more frivolous, occasionally downright goofy end of teh IDM spectrum, Global Goon's music has long been notable for its sense of fun over sonic invention. In acknowledging this, Family Glue may just be his best record yet. Weilding breaks, loops, and squelchy globs of synth, the album arrives at a uniquely funky strain of off-kilter, Technicolor party ymusic, absorbent funk, hip-hop, disco and '80s videogame music.

The opening "Electrostatic Bonj De Lonj," for example, sound slike hip-hop by way of a cute, cuddly Japanese cartoon, while the following "Who Goncha Ya?" rides a chorus-pedelled funk bass line and vocal doo-doo-doos over skittering funk breaks. Elsewhere, there's twisted disco in "Dead Weird Keks, " and "Hawaii" features some of the most incessantly catchy vocal trickery in recent memory. The final two tracks may conclude the album by veering into mellow ambient soundscapery, but there's no dampening this record's daffy, party-hearty zeal.
-Allan Harrisdon

Global Goon : Family Glue
[Penny Black] UK
Johnny Hawk a.k.a. Global Goon certainly does not live by any contemporary rule of overproduction! Spread over a period of almost eight years three albums, a few singles and remixes went before this little masterpiece, most notably on the Rephlex label. Audio Dregs from Portland, Oregon now release his american debut 'Family Glue' and if there's any justice in the pop biz, Global Goon should dominate, er, globally, soon.

There is a constant quality and an intrinsic beauty in the work of Global Goon who rewrites lullabies and jolly melodies one vaguely remembers from cartoons. Happy memories delivered with great joy, plus with the sheer intention of enjoying himself too, made the 'Family Glue' album such an innocent yet very valuable treat. 'Family Glue' oozes with warm bleeps and gorgeous ditties. An uplifting affair that's certain to please the French and the Japanese, but will the rest of the world care for Global Goon? Check the bright, three-minute wonders of 'Friendship Never Dies' and 'Dead Weird Keks'. Then if your head's still not in the clouds, you probably don't like music after all.
-Maarten Schiethart

Global Goon : Family Glue
[autre directions] France
The liverpuldien Global Goon reappears. Its new opus has just appeared, two years after the Vatican Nitez, from of which it sest distant musicalement. Because called Family Glue has to see more with a package of acid drops and multicoloured: the lemon which pricks, the cutter which éc?ure, the blackcurrant which pimousse...
This fourth album (the three precedents are appeared on Rephlex) left to J-Hok before dêtre republished by Audio Dregs. Enough short, it distils ditties electronica-IDM with the melodies entêtantes a little disco music, a little rock'n'roll, a little funk, not badly stupid.
Electrostatic Bonj De Lonj ouve the disc with its hopping, its side vieillot and funny air. Who Goncha Ya? is more serious at side, in spite of its light vocal old story. You Set My Face One Fire is a micro tube fringuant delectropop and of the same, and one can only caracoler with lécoute of this Glory B dazing. Further, Hawaii is an improbable title, with low hypnotic, treated songs, odd sounds, while Pause is true extraterrestrial in this childish and amused disc. The lemon which pricks, the cutter which éc?ure, the blackcurrant which pimousse... Guaranteed delicacies pure cholesterol.

Global Goon : Family Glue
(Cyclic Defrost) Australia
Apparently Johnny Hawk (aka Global Goon) roomed with Richard D. James in London in the mid-90s before releasing his 1996 Rephlex debut Goon, which was followed by Cradle of History and then Vatican Nitez. The Aphex Twin influence is still audible on Family Glue, his fourth album, but that's not a complaint. Think of Hawk as a less jaded Aphex, someone for whom the innocent joy of music-making is still very much alive, a quality largely absent from Come To Daddy and drukqs, whatever their other redeeming qualities. Goon is also more straightforward and less self-indulgent than Aphex, as all eleven tracks on this succinct set make their point with dispatch and end before the four-minute mark. With only one exception (the spacey yet unremarkable “Pause”), all songs are up-tempo; anyone looking for somber melancholia won't find it on Family Glue. A typical Goon track features a propulsive bass and drums combination over which bright synth melodies sing and subtle vocal flavourings appear, and he often incorporates a bucolic synth sound that'll be familiar to Boards of Canada listeners. “Electrostatic Bonj De Lonj” opens the set on a high note with its bright analog synths, beefy bass lines, and laconic but assured drum beats, and the good times continue with “Who Gonched Ya?” Here an intricate, Plaid-styled beat kicks the track into gear accompanied by slithering lead bass lines. “Dead Weird Keks” has a sweet funk-rock vibe, while the organ runs in “Friendship Never Dies” give it a soul-jazz feel; Goon even finds a spot for the by-now familiar 'funky drummer' beat in “Glory B.” Admittedly, Goon's pop-IDM-disco-funk hybrid lacks the moments of brilliance and depth that distinguish the best Aphex tracks, but Hawk makes up for it by distilling the irreverent spirit of Wagon Christ and James's analog sparkle into a jubilant cocktail.
-Ron Schepper