Review: Goat, SWX – ‘When the world ends you better hope that Goat are soundtracking it’

In Cookie Mueller’s brilliant book of essays about hanging out with John Waters and various nutcases in Baltimore, she constantly mentions a set of places.

These are places that will survive the collapse of civilisation as we know it. They are the convergence of ley lines, special places. Special places if you are oddly unhinged anyway. Places like Stonehenge, the great pyramid in Egypt, Easter Island, Atlantis.

If these places are special, if they are protected, then there’s no doubt which band would be playing as the world burns. Goat. Goat would be playing.

Most bands try to create a world around them when they play. They try to conjure a sense of place, or time. Not many bands actively try to move you to a different mental space, to a different plane. Goat do. Not only do they try, they succeed.

The extravagantly masked, Swedish, psych/folk/rock band pick up SWX, whirl it violently around their collective heads and fling it, ecstatic, into space.

Watching Goat is a thrilling, but utterly disorientating, experience. The masks are incredible, each member hidden behind a persona of their own, and it means that gender becomes completely meaningless. Equally genre is pretty meaningless too. They’re almost impossible to quantify.

Soon You Die sets up a relentless groove that barely lets up for the entire show. It’s seductive and impossible to resist, it’s not funk but it’s funky, although the 70s wah wah guitar carries echoes of those mythic blaxploitation soundtracks.

Pulsating voodoo drums hammer the rhythm down, further adding to the sense of being slowly wrapped up by a snake with hypnotic eyes.

Then the two vocalists appear, enormous headdresses in place, masks over faces; they are members of the Star Wars Cantina band, they are high priestesses of a tambourine thrashing cult, they are devilish, whirling, malevolent spirits.

Under No Nation, from the latest album Oh Death, causes pandemonium. The SWX crowd becomes a heaving, writhing, undulating mass.

You know that dreadful scene in 80s schlock horror film Society? When all the bodies meld together? It’s like that only way more fun. Psych funk pulling bodies together, a swarm of frantic maracas adding disquiet and two, perfectly harmonised, voices directing the madness. It’s a glorious noise.

If bodies and gender are fluid by now, genres are about to go the same way. Moving from wah wah drenched space rock of Fill My Mouth to the, frankly insane, recorder solo of Time for Fun seems perfectly normal. Which it certainly is not.

There’s some sort of evocation of Pan going on here, a twisted Folk Horror orgy of joy. We are being led to that Wicker Man and grinning at the fun of it all. Disco Fever is simply the dance of the demented, the vocalists flying across the stage in Hellfire Club contortions.

By now trying to keep up with what’s going on is almost impossible. There are huge splurges of Sabbath-y sludge one minute, colossal locked grooves the next, rhythmic bongos and then thunderous, floor-shaking carnage, blinding lights and that hypnotic groove. Then there are three utterly delirious moments.

Let It Burn is, probably, Goat’s best known song. It lopes along, infectious and irresistible. It worms into your bloodstream, matches the beat of your heart until it entirely takes you over.

Latest single, Do the Dance, sounds a bit feeble when Radio 6 play it, there’s no heft. Live, it’s a different beast altogether though. Bass that rearranges various internal organs and gleeful, impish mayhem.

All of which just leaves Run to Your Mama, more a threat than an expression of concern, a huge Dhol style rhythm inspires mystic hand jives as those Sabbath-y stabs create further dancefloor mayhem.

When the world ends you better hope that Goat are soundtracking it. It’s going to be so much fun.

Main photo: Archie McNamara

Read next:

• Review: Morganway, The Louisiana – ‘A massive, stadium filling, country-rocking beast of a thing’
• Review: Bartees Strange, Rough Trade – ‘It’s all you can do not to crumble into a puddle of tears’
• Review: Ben Gregory, Rough Trade – ‘The gig is a celebration’

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