It seems a small miracle that Sweden’s Goat have been together 10 years and reached album number five with their mythology largely intact. Still little is known about these ritual-masked hypno-rockers supposedly from the cursed town of Korpilombolo, and on Medicine they fully play on the mysticism, allure and death-cult menace that allows them.
One minute they’re intoning: ‘I will find a way to find you… I’m going to relieve you of your soul’ over sitar and backwards guitar, like the monster from It Follows taking the form of 1968 George Harrison, the next, to You’ll Be Alright’s tones of psych-era Pink Floyd and no little jazz flute, they’re offering comfort and reassurance: ‘I’ll be right there.’
Goat’s merging of blues-metal drones, jackal-bone rhythms, pastoral Swedish psych-folk and warped Led Zeppelin grooves remains consuming – if a touch overdone by now – but it’s refreshing to be jolted out of whack here and there by a fuzzmetal freak-out like Join The Resistance, an impassioned cry for revolution from the ghost dimension.
It’s the Medicine we need, and it works best when they up the dosage.
