Goat cast more spells on their new album.
It’s well known to some but for new potential acolytes, Goat’s semi-mythical back story is well worth recounting.
Allegedly forming in the tiny Swedish hamlet of Korpilombolo, the three main members of the group – only a Christian Johansson has been confirmed by name – wear masks when performing and take inspiration from, so they say, the ‘voodoo rituals’ which have been taking place (it says here) in the village ever since a witch doctor took up residence.
Relocated latterly in a freer worshipping Gothenburg, over the last decade the trio have produced a string of weird and wonderful albums which embraced prog, jazz and psych rock amongst a grab bag of styles. 2022’s Oh Death marked a sidestep into world music – think Khruangbin but with more incense – but Medicine is a conscious return to their truer path.
With typical Gnosticism, the titular potion shouldn’t be interpreted literally, instead viewed as a salve: ‘For our families, friends, society, this could be done through the use of psychedelics, through meditation, through learning from other people, staying curious and never settling for a ‘solid’ identity.’
Like most things, the more you buy the schtick the easier it is to get into. Opener Impermanence And Death begins with chanting and features heavily (as it does elsewhere) some lilting Jethro Tull flute before dropping into a deep wah-wah groove, the stoner aesthetic fitting like a kaftan.
Influenced by obscure domestic seventies’ bong-friendly acts like Arbete & Fritid, Charlie & Esdor and Träd, Gräs & Stenar, the detachment and foggy menace which this branch of folk and metal sometimes brings is largely absent.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t genuine moments of gravity; cutting it back from the original’s thirteen-minute-plus duration by more than half, their cover of Join the Resistance of fellow Swedes GÅS rocks mighty hard, whilst Vakna builds hypnotically, hippier in delivery than a flower painted Rolls Royce.
As the slightly mythical bio might suggest, Goat however are not an outfit who always take things too seriously. In this vein the song with possibly the oddest title of the year, I Became The Unemployment Office has according to them lost something in translation, its actual subject being about love as an entitlement as opposed to being earned. It helps that the song itself a suitably hazy, interstellar overdrive kind of epic, much in the excellent vein of Wooden Shijps at their toke-friendly best.
As a further lesson, anyone who thought that reality was the real world would also probably not pen a tune like Tripping in The Graveyard, a reverb drenched mirage of spacy guitars and woodwind, designed it seems to go with the fungi of your choice whilst you do your own rubbings.
So far, so patchouli, but there are also some more surprising pockets to the madness, moments such as on the mischievous, almost pop You’ll Be Alright which oscillates around some spectral keyboard and weird, highly treated vocals. Jerkin wearers will also very much dig Raised by Hills, a galactic folk outing that sounds like the theme tune to a black and white TV documentary.
Is Medicine serious then or not? It doesn’t really matter, because any suspension of your belief will be entirely down to the openness of your mind, and Goat are musically plugged into an era which had fewer cares about who did what whilst they were listening to it.
Magic or not there are spells a plenty here, just take the pill and be prepared to have your doors of perception blasted off.
