I suppose it makes sense that as the whole Ghostbox thing starts to get a little long in the tooth, the label should begin to expand its aesthetic remit slightly, welcoming in a slightly younger generation on music-makers for whom newly-excavated shadows of the ‘80s form the primary source material, as the hallowed ‘70s fall deeper into the semi-remembered past. Hence: Martin Jenkins, whose work here thankfully rises above his somewhat twee recording moniker, building a familiarly Ghostbox-y nest of retro-spook comforts from… well, you can guess where he’s going be going with this, right?

Yes, cry out in delight or bury your head in your hands as you will, but I’m afraid he’s going to John Carpenter town, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As my Umberto review in the last post will have hopefully made clear, my own reaction to such things is still very much in the former category, so I’m good. To reduce ‘Sleep Games’ to the horribly reductive, “in-a-nutshell” style summary it seems to be crying out for, what’s essentially going on here is Carpenter/Howarth synth action put through a Boards of Canada filter. Obviously there’s more to be pulled out of it should you wish, but basically if that sounds like your idea of a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy it, and if not, well, never mind.

And so things progress exactly the way you might expect: simple, hard-hitting synth lines in the foreground, gradually contaminated and warped by that oh-so-familiar brand of comforting, ordered unease, seeding the clean, sharp angles of the neon & PVC riffs with mossy, overgrown beds of artfully corroded electronic texture, sounds that seem to have been planted by some benevolent library music father way back in the mists of time and left to breed and spread within the depths of some forgotten room-sized analogue instrument… ready for when an ambitious horror movie director finally powers it up again and sits at the keyboard to kick some minimalist ass.

Like those old Boards of Canada records, it’s hard to put your finger on Precisely what it is that makes Pye Corner Audio so compelling – there’s a kind of oblique, impersonal quality to the music, a recognition of the fact that he/they isn’t really doing anything that wouldn’t be wholly expected, given the place and time from which he is broadcasting, and yet, for whatever reason, it works, where so many other contenders breakdown, mired in cheese.

Several track titles (‘The Mirrorball Cracked’, ‘Underneath the Dancefloor’) seem to invoke the kind of ‘curdled rave nostalgia’ / haunted dancefloor aesthetic that so many electronic artists have hooked onto in recent years, but in actuality ‘Sleep Games’ bears very little resemblance to any kind of music people ever danced to – it’s lineage is lonely, bedroom-dwelling electro through and through, with even the zombified Detroit techno of ‘Into The Maze’ coming to us via several brick walls at the very least. The Precinct 13 pulse of ‘The Mirror Ball Cracked’ is unmistakable, with only distant, disembodied groans serving to remind us of the time & intent separating Jenkins from his master, whilst ‘The Black Mill Video Tape’ leads us on precisely the kind of Stone Tape-style ghost hunt the title would suggest, perhaps relocated to some mid-80s LA backlot zone, perhaps overseen by…. yes – ‘Prince of Darkness’! You’re one step ahead of me! And we could play this game throughout the album’s fifty minute duration, right until the distant sirens and ominous synth oboe on ‘Chlorine’ take us outside the city, closing on the more familiarly pastoral Ghostbox stylings of ‘Nature Reclaims The Town’.

Now that Ghostbox have caught up with the era of VHS and Snake Plisskin, who knows what delights await as the reconfigured nostalgia wagon rumbles on? Things are moving quickly, as advance guards in the states are already plundering the most lamentable forgotten corners of the ‘90s for inspiration, and a pertinent question for a few years down the line might be: what the hell do we do when it catches up with now?

Labels: best of 2012, Goat, Lantern, Peaking Lights, Pye Corner Audio, The Caretaker

Goat – World Music
(Rocket Recordings)

So, I’m currently listening to this album by the Swedish band Goat, who are attracting a lot of attention at the moment on a sorta mask-wearing, voodoo-referencing heavy psyche/faux-afrobeat tip. (That’s quite a tip.)

After years of regularly giving out-of-nowhere hyped records a cursory internet spin and inevitably finding them wanting, it’s pretty refreshing to find one that’s pinned me back in my seat with an immediate “holy shit, this KICKS ASS” response.

Learning that it’s been brought to the world’s attention by Bristol’s Rocket Recordings (home of The Heads, as a plaque above their office door should read) certainly makes sense.

I mean… jeez. This is really something.

In fact its best tracks pander to what I want to hear at any given moment so well, it makes me suspicious.

It’s like Goat have identified this particular demographic of people who like listening to OTT heavy rock, weird ’70s occult hippie junk and groove-heavy African music and thought, ok, those guys have got disposable income, let’s give ‘em what they want and PLENTY OF IT. I’m sure they’d like some really wild, raw-throated female vocals too? Hey, why not – that stuff always goes down well.

Here’s an unlikely comparison, but one that I just can’t shake: you know that band The Go Team? The way that they made a career out of putting together lots of tried-and-tested, crowd-pleasing musical ‘good bits’, adding an enthusiastic female figurehead/hype-woman to keeping the energy levels sufficiently high and thus becoming this perfect, one-size-fits-all upbeat festival band..? Well imagine if serious-music-fan dudes who wear black hoodies and go to the Supersonic festival had their own version of The Go Team – that’s basically what Goat sounds like. Which certainly shouldn’t be taken as a criticism – what that sounds like turns out to be pretty great.

If you read some press on Goat (cf: this interview here), you’ll learn that they aspire to total anonymity, and have a lively back-story that posits them as the latest generation of a Master Musicians of Joujouka style legacy of musicians hailing from a remote Swedish village, whose residents have purportedly been performing this music for decades, inspired by an unexpected ancient incursion of what the band term ‘voodoo’ into the heart of the Scandinavian countryside.

It’s nice that they should at least go through the motions of attaching some kind of mystery and aesthetic interest to what they do, but obviously few of us will trust this origin story as far as we can throw it – Goat’s sound is faaar too calculated and contemporary to be the result of some kind of hermetic, communal jamming tradition, and in particular, their use of the term ‘voodoo’ strikes me as extremely irksome and ill thought-out, in view of a set of music that takes it’s rhythmic cues primarily from North Africa, as opposed to, say, the Caribbean or Louisiana. I mean, if they wanted to invest their music with some kind of scary, incongruous spirituality, would it really have taken that much effort to google up a bit of reading on some of the indigenous folk religions that are practiced in the places they’re borrowing their grooves from, rather than just going “oh, yeah, voodoo, that’ll do..”.

Appropriation of African music has of course reached epidemic proportions in indie culture over the past few years, and if Goat immediately rise far above the pack on a musical level simply by vestige of not totally sucking, on an aesthetic level I fear their whole project seems a tad dodgy. Beyond the voodoo thing, just check out the way that all their videos on youtube cut their music to slideshows of just about the corniest bunch of African stock footage you can imagine (wot, no elephants?), an approach that creeps into some of the songs on the second half of ‘World Music’, when the all-consuming curtain of fuzz guitar pulls back to reveal the workings beneath. The beats are still tight, the groove is still solid, as respectable a tribute to ‘70s afro-beat as you could wish for, but when cheesy-as-hell overdubbed steel drums chime in halfway through ‘Golden Dawn’ or gratuitous bongos infest the unhelpfully named ‘Disco Fever’, it’s hard not to step back and think, are you fucking kidding? Give it a rest, you guys are from SWEDEN ferchrissake. I mean, what’s next, warpaint and grass skirts?

Whilst all that certainly merits discussion however, at the end of the day it doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of ‘Wold Music’ unduly – such cultural missteps are water off a duck’s back once the unholy commotion of opening cuts ‘Goatman’ and ‘Goathead’ kick in.

In the past few years, as innumerable great compilations and reissues and mix tapes of ‘70s African music have started doing the rounds (such rediscovery representing the silver lining behind all that Vampire Weekend bullshit), overexcited excavators have often been apt to describe this or that band/record as “the African Stooges”, a tag that not even the most raucous of these recordings can really live up to. In fact, the whole conception is a total misnomer really – listen to enough of this stuff and you’ll begin to understand that ‘70s Africa didn’t really want or need any Stooges. After all, punk rock may be universal in spirit, but were guys in Lagos or Accra ever really likely to give a damn for Iggy Pop’s conception of “white, suburban delinquent music”? Why should they?

So, with a genuine African Stooges not forthcoming, it was hardly surprising that some white (presumably) guys should eventually set out make their own, and we should praise the lord that Goat have nailed this tricky concept so well straight outta the gate, fusing prime Fela Kuti style funk with a layer of Asheton-worthy fuzz-wah destruction, their vocalist’s formidable, free festival-subjugating bellow simply providing the icing on what is undoubtedly a bloody brilliant cake - pretty much the most immediate, refreshing and quantifiably bad-ass sound I’ve heard all year.

It is with these two cuts that Goat really establish their credentials. After that, the record gets a bit different, spreading its net a bit wider than is really necessary given the quality of the template they’ve already established for themselves, with results that I’m gonna call as… varied, but largely positive.

As noted, ‘Disco Fever’ is probably the weakest cut – a Fela-lite sorta confection, let down by some particularly banal English lyrics - but for the following ‘Golden Dawn’ we’re back on board, with post-punk monster bass and a vicious guitar solo contributing to a really cool, heavy little number, even if it is prematurely cut short at 2:50.

With a simple three chord trick riff and almost 4/4 kit drumming, ‘Let It Bleed’ catches Goat at their most, uh, mainstream acceptable – very much the kind thing that brought that Go Team comparison to mind – an impression that’s only intensified when a brass section unexpectedly wades in for an ‘Ethiopiques’-style horn hoe-down. It’s hard to deny the results are fairly enjoyable (distantly reminiscent of that great Ex & Getachew Mekuria album from a few years back, if only for the lack of any other relevant reference points), however gratuitous and tokenistic such stylistic borrowing may seem.

‘Run to Your Mother’ meanwhile reveals some of their Northern European psyche roots, with the vocalist seemingly channelling Shocking Blue’s Mariska Veres over some Sabbathian hard rock moves (never a bad thing), with results not a million miles away from the kinda stuff you might hear ‘70s fetishists like Dungen or Witchcraft getting up to, assuming you can still be bothered to give them the time of day, with only the inclusion of repetitive strumming from some kinda monotone acoustic string instrument(?) really exercising at the Goat’s on-going obsession with cross-cultural ‘aural excitement’.

And really, it’s only this borderline kitschy ‘kitchen sink and be damned’ approach, (relentlessly applying ‘exotic’ instrumentation as if the band fear we’ll get bored if they’re not constantly throwing new sounds at us), that mutes the impact of what could be an utterly monolithic debut album. But as the modal riffs and droning middle-eastern strings of closing epic ‘Diarabi’ proceed muddy the waters further, the band finally seem to find their own niche, building a kind of dense, alien groove over seven-ish minutes that sounds like nothing except themselves (give or take a few opium den vibes shared with fellow travellers Sylvester Anfang II), offering a good king-hell climax to proceedings that bodes well for future excursions.

In spite of my reservations, the best bits of this record are stunning, and as much as I might wish that the tracks were longer, more organic, less contrived, it’s hard to turn our nose up at the abundant qualities of what we HAVE got here – which is basically the kernel of a truly mighty band, and probably one of the most beserk and enjoyable records I’ve heard thus far in this underwhelming year of our lord 2012.

Labels: album reviews, Goat