Goatsblood
Drull
5
When my son was a toddler we used to play keepaway. I would have something he wanted, he would try to grab it and I would move it out of his reach just as his hands got close. This was a pretty fun game, up to a point. As a father you learn fairly quickly that when that game goes a little longer than it should your kid goes from delightfully frustrated to pissed off and willing to kill you if the child was big enough and could get the hand-eye coordination together. It's a kind of artistic thing, knowing when to give the kid what he wants. Give it too early and you will end up playing the game for an hour. Too late and your wife will come in and hit you with a frying pan. Goatsblood plays a game like that with Drull. I have a theory about brains: they always look for patterns. Whether there are patterns or not, the brain is only content when it has a pattern even if it has to make one up out of nothing. Music, at its most basic, is a pattern your brain recognizes and dresses up with all this shit - images, emotions, memories, ideas - and that is where it becomes art. Goatsblood's game is to keep the pattern from you, like I kept the object away from my kid, and to frustrate you happily as you keep reaching for the pattern and they keep drawing it away. It's not a new idea. I think the first band I heard do it successfully was Melvins and their record Ozma, a beautiful slab of stoner sludge that seemed to have been built entirely out of musical bridges, foregoing the verse, chorus and solos we are all accustomed to in music. Now, the thing is, Melvins paid you off with some occasional patterns you could grasp. They played the game artfully on Ozma, and I love that disc with a passion. Goatsblood, however, never quite delivers the payoff. And what starts out as a game of keep away with the musical patterns ends up becoming just a frustrating exercise in unkept promises. There is art in that, I have to admit. A slap in the face to anyone who thinks they can simply have what they want from this band. But I can't recommend this record solely on its demonstration of where the "power" lies. I do love this record's sound, rich, deep, fragrant, much like Folgers in your cup. The band is tight (if you have ever tried to learn a cover of a Melvins song from Ozma, you know how maddening it can be to play this style) and they seem to be talented individually, but the true gift is playing these drawn out, seemingly random songs as tightly as they do. The singer is, for the most part, a single toned irritant, like Cephalic Carnage without any low end roaring. He wears on you. But the production is crisp and voluminous. It sounds fucking brilliant on my car system with a lot of bass. Bottom line: The amount of pointlessness this CD contains, for me at least, cancels out the heavy sound they produce. I can see the more avant among us really digging the randomness, the sludgy, Sabbathy slowness with spurts of grindcore that never really goes anywhere. In fact I can see this band enjoying a decent following of people who "get it", but for me these guys played the game too long. It left me feeling like I would like to hear the actual record Drull is the intro to some time. I might listen to it again, but I couldn't promise to.
