Masked, anonymous and attached to a dubious folk-horror backstory (concerning, among other things, Sweden’s apparently lively history of voodoo curses), Goat have long found their tone between the spookhouse camp of Ghost and the saturnine pagan nightmares of Comus.
In Goat’s hands the two sound like natural bedfellows, but make no mistake, it’s a tricky tightrope to walk: eerie but not too scary to dance to; playful but not too kitschy for ritual. Scoring the BBC’s The Gallows Pole, a Better-Call-Saul-worthy tale of fraud and chicanery set in the gloomy candlelight of eighteenth century Yorkshire (featuring an ambiguously metaphorical chorus of stag-headed spectres) was a natural fit, prompting a slew of compelling new compositions and an eerie, cinematically rich arrangement of back-catalogue gems.
Intact though the trademark Goat tone is, The Gallows Pole nevertheless tramps through an impressively diverse stylistic landscape. Album opener “Let it Burn”, though folkishly light on its feet, plants its flag in the neo-Sabbathian trad doom of Green Lung or Kyuss: more riffy than rhythmic, it lashes songbirding flutes and scratchy wah-pedal to slithery drugged-out fuzz bass. We sober up a song later, though: the ambient gloom of “Mind Is Like The Sky” is, if not outright hostile, deeply menacing, drenched in the miasmic drone of violins and cellos and weighed insistantly down by disembodied, pebble-dense piano chords. “Jazzman” could be a lost Porcupine Tree B-side; “Vallat”’s clangs and chimes sound like the background to a spoken Tom Waits interlude; the loose flute-led stoner-funk of “Fill My Mouth” is Queens Of The Stone Age by way of Jethro Tull. Only on “The Gate Is Open (The Temple Lies Within)” and “Gathering of Ancient Tribes” do Goat draw wholeheartedly on their classic formula: sprawling percussion batteries conjuring single-minded grooves, chants rather than hooks, vamps rather than melodies, a repeating kaleidoscopic circle layered and re-layered over with new lines and ascending from funk to frenzy to furore – that rotational symmetry, otherwise, is absent. On The Gallows Pole, songs that have destinations move towards them. Songs that do not remain hauntingly motionless.What keeps the whole thing coherent is Goat’s deft control over exactly how seriously they want to be taken. While the band gleefully plunders genres, it plunders with a discerning eye. “Jazzman” has a prog-rock whimsy to it, but none of the grandiosity. The fuzz bass sound on “Let It Burn” goes for scratchy white noise rather than weight, and evokes ’70s proto-metal bluesiness without favouring the ominous, confrontational density that metal has developed in the meantime. As chilling a haunted house as “Mind Is Like The Sky” is, it forgoes the jumpscares of Suicide or late Scott Walker.
The Gallows Pole is not confrontational or difficult, but within the constraints of that magnanimity it manages to be dangerous, compelling and gorgeously evocative. As a soundtrack, as a psychedelic music album, as pure midnight witchery, it’s a great success, and a rewarding find for those willing to push into the odds and ends of Goat’s discography.-L Francesca Liddle-
