Album of the Week: Goat – Goat
Goat first arrived back in 2012 with their debut album World Music at a time when psychedelic music made by indie groups was riding an all time high. Their debut sat comfortably amongst releases by prominent artists in the genre Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Tame Impala, Sun Draw, White Hills, and Crystal Stilts amongst others. Since then the Swedish group have continued to release music at a steady rate with Commune (2014), Requiem (2016), Oh Death (2022) and last year’s Medicine. Throughout the group have remained anonymous (to the music press at least), disguising their identities by performing in elaborate stage costumes that render them as shamanic, voodoo worshipping rural outsiders who claim to be from the remote locality of Korpilombolo in Northern Sweden. Where the truth lies and where the myth begins is anyone’s guess… the most important bit is the music this intriguing group produce is usually nothing short of magnificent.
Their newest album and third in as many years is self-titled, a choice usually, though not always, considered appropriate for a debut and upon hearing Goat, I can’t help but think World Music, the title of their inaugural release may have been a title better suited. In a lot of ways, Goat is musical travelogue of influences and styles, and appears to be something of a culmination of much of what Goat have aimed for since their formation.
Throughout Goat, the band indulge in expansive psychedelic rock linked directly to the tradition of their 60s/70s Swedish forebears (the Parson Sound/International Harvester/Trad Gras och Stenar axis being notable) generating giant, gluttonous slabs of hypnotic, droning lysergic guitar, big pounding jackhammer rhythms and wailing, wild vocals offering snatches of cosmic, consciousness altering magic. Opening track One More Death provides all of this and more, the highlight being an insanely overdriven guitar solo mid way through that eventually gives way to a middle-eastern tinged coda suggestive of Anatolian psych.
While Goat is replete with plenty of mind-melting psychedelic pyrotechnics, it also presents some of the groups funkiest music to date. Goatbrain delves into the mesmeric rhythms of West African psych-fusion suggestive of something like Benin legends Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. Dollar Bill is something else entirely, one of the best tracks to group have laid down, it mixes their hallucinogenic ritual rock with psychedelic funk of Parliament and Funkadelic. The brilliant extended, soulful guitar solo and trancey rhythm that dominates this excellent track’s last two and a half minutes has more than a whiff of George Clinton and Eddie Hazel about it.
The group switch things up again with the hip hop inspired Zombie, here the group present something not so far away from 90s G-Funk, though featuring the folkish, yearning vocal son the female singer as opposed to Dre and Snoop. In some ways I can’t get away from feeling there is something Ace of Base about it… which some may think is a negative but it is quite the contrary! Zombie is punctuated by piercing, high-in-the-mix guitar flourishes which remind me of some of those sinewy synth melodies Dre made famous. The bizarrely titled Frisco Beaver is pure fun(k), and its manic, repetitive grooves and guitar work recalls mid ‘70s Can. The krautrock group who of course incorporated elements of African and Eastern music to their revolutionary brand of experimental rock – perhaps most notably on their Ethnological Forgery Series tracks found on the 1976 compilation Unlimited Edition.
Both Fools Journey and All Is One offer somewhat plaintive, reflective comedowns from the riot of the rest of the record – the former being pure exercise in freak-folk akin to the sort pioneered by similarly-minded popular music outliers the Incredible String Band. All Is One on the other hand opts for the combo of a gently finger picked acoustic accompanied by solemn, reverberating tones of free-form electric guitar, ending with a sample of the cosmic proclamations of a would-be guru. Suitably, the album closes out with an extended, seven minute funk inspired concoction that transforms from dance ditty into an all encompassing sonic melee of droning horns, buried indecipherable vocal samples (think I Am the Walrus’ outro) and wave upon wave of feedback.
Goat ~ Goat is OUT NOW on Indies Special Swirl Vinyl, Standard Black Vinyl & CD.
