Goat Photo: Andreas Johansson
Nick Bollinger explores the fancy-dress fantasias of Gothenburg sextet Goat.
Rock’n’roll has always been, in part, a game of self-reinvention. But here’s a band who have invented more than just a performance persona. They seem to have invented an entire country, its ceremonial rituals and its soundtrack.
Goat is a band of sometimes six members, sometimes more, whose identities remain obscure, in part because they usually perform in masks, or with their faces substantially covered by outlandish and decorative costumes. The group is Swedish, this much is known, and are currently based in Gothenburg, though they claim to have originated in a small village in Sweden’s far north where, according to their own mythology, a tradition of voodoo worship has existed since a travelling witchdoctor passed that way several centuries ago. If that all sounds a wonderful bunch of hokum, so - in a way - does the music.
Earlier Goat albums were thoroughly electrified and wouldn’t have sounded entirely out of place in a particularly trancey nightclub or dance festival. But this latest one is, in many ways, their most ethnic-sounding yet. A track like ‘Temple Rhythms’, with its pounding percussion and hyperventilated flute, could almost be a field recording from some ceremonial hoedown in Mali or maybe Mississippi. The African influence is even more pronounced in the electric guitar playing, which often calls on the scales and modes of the desert blues.
At other times it’s more of a highlife feel, and the high unison vocals – which in the past have made Goat sound like long-lost cousins of the B-52s – just enhance the swinging, palm-wine flavour of the music.
But if some of these tracks could pass as ethnographic specimens of exotic kinds of roots music, there have been moments on every Goat album in which their western roots show through. And there’s more than one tune here where I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of the rock group behind those feathers, headdresses, and ceremonial robes. In the aptly-titled ‘Goatfuzz’ they might be psychedelic proto-metallers, in exile since the ‘60s.
You could hear Goat’s Requiem as being in a great tradition of fancy-dress fantasias, from Dr John’s Gris-Gris to Bowie’s Ziggy. The trick is to make it impossible for the audience – at least in that moment - to ever imagine you might once have been some normal inhabitant of suburbia, like themselves. And at the very least Goat seem to have mastered that.
Songs featured: Alarms, Temple Rhythms, I Sing In Silence, Trouble In The Streets, Goatfuzz, Djorolen/Union of Sun and Moon.
Requiem is available on Sup Pop Records.
