Medicine

After the intense sonic bacchanalia of their previous album, Oh Death, where the band indulged in thundering African jams, ripped leather biker rock freak-outs, and blacklight discotheque dance grooves, Goat take a step back from the brink on Medicine. The voice that asks "shall we practice a little meditation together" at the start of the album gives a clue as to what will follow as the band downshifts the tempos, adds in fluttering flute solos, and with a few exceptions, dials in to a hypnotically healing frequency. It being Goat, their brand of meditation still involves melodically shouted vocals, heavily trippy guitars, and rhythms that percolate and bubble invitingly. The first song on the record, "Impermanence & Death," lays out the template with its wood flute solo thats chased off center stage by a mercurially slow, evil-sounding guitar solo while the bass and percussion set up a slow-rolling, nodding groove thats easy to sink into. Most of the album sticks to this kind of restrained, almost precise approach as it very rarely explodes into the flights of intensity that Oh Death and their more recent work often has. On songs like the dreamily rambling "Tripping in the Graveyard," the Swedish folk-inspired, quite pagan-sounding "Raised by Hills," and "TSOD" -- which features a rare male lead vocal -- the band calmly submerge their psychedelia in buckets of reverb, layers of guitars, and a cloud of smoke. Its a choice that opens up a new realm of psychedelia for the group to conquer, and they triumph with a glorious power thats all the more impressive for how restrained it all is. Even when they do swing back into heavier territory -- as they do on "Join the Resistance," which has loads of funk and freakiness, not to mention some Zeppelin-heavy guitars and a Black Sabbath-influenced outro -- they do it with a light touch that registers high on the pleasure scale. At the time of Medicines release, there were a metric ton of bands doing the psychedelic thing with varying degrees of success. Goat prove once again on Medicine that they deserve to be in the top echelon where the groups, past or present, who play this style of music with an incalculable amount of imagination and an unquenchable desire to scale new heights of sound are nobly enshrined. ~ Tim Sendra