Review Summary: A seductively shallow psych-groove triumph
Don’t take me for a fool, I know as well as anyone psychedelia is dead, dead, dead, as much as anything in the age where everything’s alive, revived, resurrected, rejuvenated, reborn so flat and glittering all over your computer screen. To talk about what psychedelia was when it was alive is to open another whole can of worms or kettle of fish or other off-putting food-adjacent item. But damn if
Goat doesn’t feel real, if this doesn’t feel like something that exists in worlds coated in mud-daubing and highway scent, smoke and incense and some of the tastiest, most pungent guitar-work this side of the flower-strewn highways. It’s an album of stretching tendrils, waves of air vibrating throughout the body, pulsations of color and breezy mood.
World Music didn’t strike me as anything too far out of the ordinary.
Medicine had my respect, but it never really had my heart, or my faith.
Goat are claiming at least one of those on this one, and if I still can’t quite buy into what they’re doing as an aesthetic, that doesn’t mean they don’t do a wonderful job of taking their hippy-drum-circle-world-music-roadtrip excursion and making a thing of pure pleasure by tightening their groove and reining in some of their more far-flung tendencies. These Swedes know how to groove like they know how to make modular furniture, they know how to lay down a black resin-caked nastiness that reeks from each and every one of their guitar solos they, in short, know how to make a
good psychedelic album.
At this point my muddled questioning of what makes a group scare-quotes authentic is happily left by the wayside. The funk-filth grooviness of Dollar Bill just washes over my brain and I am absolutely willing to forget everything else beyond the immediacy of this album. What chaff there is is light and billows away easily on the breeze; the light folk of Fools Journey is a little sparse for its own good, the reggae-leaning Zombie is both lightweight and bordering on tedious, and All Is One is a decent stage-setter for the psych-pop groove odyssey of Ouroboros, but what they don’t necessarily add to, they don’t necessarily detract from. Maybe I’ll wake up in a more sober frame of mind, willing to ask if there’s a measure of bull*** in this out-and-out worship of what turned out to be a musical ethos with its own heavy taint of bull***, but really, right now, I don’t want to. Because, at last, I’ve been near-totally seduced by the immense vitality of this record, its gentle exoticism and its absolutely silly exuberance. If the water here isn’t all that deep, the wave is still fun as hell to ride.
