World Music

When a band calls their first release World Music you expect African rhythms and quite a bit of navel gazing. What you don't expect is an album that takes the idea of World Music and actually travels the globe. From the Indian feeling Run To Your Mama to the Middle Eastern Goatman there is a lot of diversity here with a large guitar sound backed by drums and instruments from all over the globe. The fact that they come from Sweden is all the more surprising.

Golden Dawn is a great example of a funk work out crossed with hypnotic percussion - it sounds like it was made yesterday and in the seventies at the same time. Run To Your Mama has an Indian vibe and yet it has a guitar that crunches like glam rock - yes this really does mix influences and pulls that trick off extremely well. It has a toe tapping quality that will lead you to the dancefloor if its ever put on in that environment.

Other psychedelic influenced albums have come out this year, Tame Impala are getting a lot of airplay as an example. However, this is a stronger set of tracks and is really worth checking out. One of the albums of 2012

I'd read glowing reviews of this, but never quite got the actual sound of this from any of them. Not surprising, as it's one hell of a mixture of influences. Imagine one of Dr John's female backing singers stepping up to the front of stage, leading a band who were contemporaries of Can, Jimi Hendrix, Funkadelic and Hawkwind, but with a core of buzzing, jangling Afrobeat, European folk and hypnotic spiraling Middle Eastern raga. The "World Music" part of this doesn't sound like an affectation, a fashionable add-on, it's at the heart of the music; looking outwith the usual psychedelic canon to find the roots that lie in something far older and more universal. They pull it off with a lot of gusto, a lot of charm and ultimately with an immense conclusion which takes the cycle of the album right back to where it began.

Still, despite those influences it's strangely Swedish. The record I'm reminded of most through all of it is Bo Hansson's Lord Of The Rings, and that's no bad comparison as far as I'm concerned, but Goat are far more propulsive, more diverse, heavier and far more funky.

I gave it 4, but only because I reckon that they're going to make something that's even better than this. Can't stop playing it.

Swedish mystery ensemble Goat has produced one of the more dynamic and truly psych-eccentric albums of the year/for some time, toying with World percussion, disco and the brashest guitar work, like Maggot Brainesque mayhem on 'Goathead' where the female vocal tries to out-shout electric shriek and feedback until an acoustic calm washes on the sudden shore of its blitzed world.

Songs occasionally begin with spoken maxims, as on second track 'Goatman' where an echoed American male voice intones 'there is a Creole expression to walk together, where life is hard people depend upon and help each other so that man may pray together to praise the same moral principles and together reaffirm them' and the song segues into its African beats, repeated female chant/song, and the first of the album's wah-wah and then caustic guitar layers. Then there's fifth 'Golden Dawn' where an echoed female voice informs us, just after the harpsichord introduction, 'the important thing is this, to be able any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become', lines from Belgian naturalist Charles Frédéric Dubois.

Sixth 'Let It Bleed' has a funky rhythm and freeform saxophone with indecipherable female vocals, whereas seventh 'Run To Your Mama' has a Far Eastern percussive rhythm above a Black Sabbath guitar riff and the clearly audible, repeated sung line 'boy you better run to your mama now', not quite sustaining the album's toying with aphorism. Tracks like these do not have the raw power of 'Goathead', and I would have liked more of that madness.

The album finishes on ninth track 'Det som aldrig forandras/Diarabi' [`it has never changed'?] where the harmonium and percussive rhythms merge their Far Eastern sounds with rural folk - a little funked-up rhythm guitar as well in the background - and at seven minutes long it does build into a synth-orchestral climax that does seem to embrace, and perhaps postulate musically the genuine truism of the album's title, 'World Music'. It is a delightful listen.