Goat
Requiem

In general, I couldn't care less about this type of definitions. I struggle to keep up with the enthusiasm of various specialized magazines, whether it's Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, for what is always the 'next big thing.' However, when the first Goat album came out three or four years ago, I couldn't help but agree that these critics were really right. I was finally listening to something new and so great and different from everything that we neo-psychedelia enthusiasts usually listen to.

The Goat presented themselves from the beginning as an eccentric and original band with something mysterious. I'm not only referring to the content of their music. Their identities are somewhat of a mystery. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, they claim to come from Kopilombolo, a place that has an ancient tradition related to the history of the voodoo cult, as it seems a powerful sorcerer once lived there. This happened before the arrival of the Christian crusaders, who destroyed the village. The people who survived the massacre fled and cast a curse on the city.

Take this story as you will, in any case, their music itself seems to constitute a special alchemy made of voodoo rituals and full of esoteric content. Their music is consequently inevitably accompanied by kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory, and visionary explosions of color and images that refer to cultures and places far away in time and space. Something that is not common in today's suburban 'drone' neo-psychedelia, nor in any way in the psychedelia of the sixties, mostly devoted to content derived from Eastern religious culture and thought and their deep traditions and schools of thought. Their songwriting process has nothing cerebral about it but is a primordial, instinctive act. In essence, their 'creative' encounters are not aimed at creating songs but simply at making music. Their songs somehow never have a real end, and when they finally enter the recording studio, they never know how it will end up.

'Requiem' (like the previous albums) is an album that the Goat themselves would actually define as 'world music' because there are so many influences in the band's sound and because they continue to approach music with a 'multi-ethnic' style, combining a series of seemingly distant folkloric elements, searching for a common root. Defined, among other things, as their 'folk' album, 'Requiem' renews the band's collaboration with Rocket Recordings (although a special limited edition was released by Sub Pop Records - I suspect it's already sold-out, but give it a look just in case). Honestly, I have to say that if the second album seemed like a repetition of 'World Music' to me, this one truly surprised me: the Goat here ventured into experimenting with different genres and sounds like they had never done before.

The album begins with a sort of invocation to the mysterious contents of voodoo magic and the ancient gods of African mythology, deities that existed since the dawn of time ('Dj r Len / Union of Sun and Moon'), before opening into a frenzy of Latin American folk in the style of Chilean music, practically like that of Inti Illimani.

Loaded with visions and flavors from all over the world that invade our senses and take control of our bodies, we are caught in a subliminal magical rite, an orgy made of sounds and people. A fucking schizophrenic, insane therapeutic session, where each one rises up to speak their mind and apparently utters words with no meaning that instead appear perfectly clear to everyone else taking part.

The album showcases all the band's skills, moving effortlessly from genre to genre, yet always maintaining a common thread throughout all the tracks. 'Goodbye,' 'Try My Robe' are clearly inspired by Western African music and particularly that of the Tuareg people and the desert of Mali, the tishoumaren, and that gigantic band, Tinariwen. 'Troubles in the Streets' even made me think of a band that I personally consider incredible — though unfortunately not celebrated as they deserve — the Dur-Dur Band from Mogadishu, Somalia, a group that in unexpected times and locations managed to bring together funk, soul, and disco music and that I somehow ideally consider a precursor to Goat. Although the latter's repertoire is truly vast. 'Psychedelic Lover' is a bossa nova with a flamenco solo that seemingly doesn't fit and yet it does, 'It's Not Me' has hints of exotic and distant sounds, 'All-Seeing Eye' reminds me of certain Rolling Stones devoted to devil worship and playing the marimba.

If two big tracks like 'Goatfuzz' and 'Goatband' are typical fuzz-psychedelia, a special mention and separate attention deserve the last track of the album, 'Ubuntu,' which reminded me of a song by the Brian Jonestown Massacre from the album 'Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?' of 2010, 'Felt Tipped-Pen Pictures of UFOs,' where John Lennon's famous statement that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus was taken and mixed in a lysergic trip. The song ('Ubuntu') is permeated by a dreamy and crystal-clear atmosphere, where in the background we hear an indistinct conversation under an obsessive and repetitive synth sound. It's a song that made me think of the process of 'creation.' I mean, in this case, I'm talking about creation in the sense of the moment of birth. You come into the world, slowly open your eyes, and finally, you see, indistinctly, the light, and you hear words that mean absolutely nothing to you and unfortunately will never mean anything, because you'll never manage to remember them. They're just blurry and confused sounds that you'll forget having ever heard in the vast majority of cases (exceptions do exist, however). A cut to the umbilical cord and everything is over. Requiem? Or perhaps another act of god, that primordial principle that created the universe through a process of self-manifestation and the expression of the divine spirit. A process that gave order, life, and movement to matter. The creator, the mover, the mystical source of all existence and that feeds the matter of which the cosmos is composed and the power that gives shape and substance and orders the right balance between life and death. This is just the beginning. Welcome.