Goat - 'Goatbrain'
Sweden’s mystery-shrouded purveyors of a unique psychedelic soup embrace the funk with their new single ‘Goatbrain’.
Swedish enigma Goat are a band wreathed in a level of opacity that could almost be described as occult, obscured by layers of mystery and misdirection which has seen them attain a cult-like following in the years since ‘World Music’ was released in 2012. The band, in various guises and with a revolving cast of members, had been honing their craft for some time before that - 30, 40 or 200+ years depending on who is asked - from the humble locale of Korpilombolo, a small village in the north east of Sweden. They perform in masks and costumes, so going to see the band live always comes with the nagging fear that they might one day get narked off with a promoter, or in fact just say ‘fuck it’, and pull an MF DOOM.
And, as was the case with DOOM’s unmistakeable flow, impostors would be easily spotted. Goat’s redolent gumbo of sound, combining as it does psychedelia, garage rock, funk, desert rock and afrobeat, is the product of something perhaps better described as a musical collective than a band; but it is definitely unique, a musical signature which one cannot imagine being easily replicable by others. The first single from their upcoming self titled album, ‘Ouroboros’, sounds as if it were a deep cut found in the basement of a funk-focused record store 100 years from now; perhaps a time capsule sent back by a future incarnation of the band, but unmistakably made by musicians trained in the same hidden commune in the Scandinavian wilds from which our era’s manifestation of the band has been sending out their aural messages for these past few years.
‘Goatbrain’, the second single to be released, similarly draws from the funkier side of their catalogue but is more rooted in the recent past. Its repetitive refrain sounds like a fuzzier, beefier version of a long lost release by The Meters - like something, in fact, that would be sampled during that golden age of hip hop in which DOOM cut his teeth - but with a roving, timeless quality. This is enhanced by that ethereal, anonymous female vocal which defines Goat’s sound and which seems to transcend any attempt to impose temporal classification on musical expression (in the process pissing on my pitiful music journo comparisons to other artists, movements and in fact the whole dubious idea of genre.) The sense of rhythm is impeccable, but something bigger and more amorphous seems to lurk beneath.
The music video, created by Swedish artist Freddy Wallin, makes an able attempt to live up to such cosmic meandering. A horned goat brain travels the cosmos, past crumbling maps and floating scraps of sheet music, through starry skies and down collaged city streets where shadowy figures dance and prostrate themselves. Patterns swirl, repeat, but are never quite symmetrical, in much the same way that certain Islamic weavers will leave a line of thread at odds with its surroundings in order to acknowledge the essential fallibility of humankind in the face of the infinite.
At the video’s end, the goat brain can be found above a building, figures within dancing whilst the ones on the roof seemingly bow towards it. Both brain and building are hurtling through space, a fitting image for a band who so carefully combine the corporeal and the cosmic. If this and their previous single are anything to go by then the self titled record, which is being released on October 11, will not be one to miss.
Words by Jono Coote
