So we're just left with one album to do. Batty, I'm had originally decided I would not be tackling
SLeep's Holy Mountain as I already endured Sleep thanks to Wpnfire and had no desire to hear any more. Then you convinced me, but sadly time has run out on me and I literally don't have the energy or indeed the time to listen to and review another album. So I'll make you a promise, to review it outside of Metal Month, but for now this is the last one on your list.
Flower of Disease --- Goatsnake --- 2000 (Southern Lord)
Suggested by The Batlord
I remember commenting on how much I liked a Goatsnake track Batty posted a while back, which is probably why he's suggested this album to me. It's the title track that gets us away, with what sounds like backwards masking fading in, then it stops and starts playing the right way around, and there's certainly a bouncy, groovy feel to this that I normally don't get from the little doom metal I have listened to. I wonder if this is the track he posted originally? Sounds familiar. Glad to hear the singer is not a growler, or one who sings into his boots; I can make this out perfectly fine. This rocks, I must say. Oh man! Harmonica! Sweet! And it really works in with the doomy melody somehow. Music is actually speeding up now: I thought the idea of doom metal was to keep it deathly slow? Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
Great solo there to take us out and into “Prayer for a dying” (I'll allow them their grammatical error here, and in the lyric too) which really strides along quite briskly, and into “Easy Greasy” (huh?) which is like no doom metal song I've ever heard. It has a jew's harp, ffs, and the lyric seems to be about drinking and having a good time --- thought this was supposed to be all sorrow and sourness? Sure, there's mention of oblivion and the idea more or less of drinking yourself into your grave, but isn't that the theme of most rock songs? Good heavy guitar driving the riff through the song, vocalist Pete Stahl sounds a little like early Ozzy.
I love the idea of “El Coyote”, as I'm reasonably well versed in Native American mythology, and the harmonica solo at the beginning just really sets the mood. Now, once again the music rocks along, more like the end part of “Black Sabbath” than the opening, and very welcome. “The dealer” then slows things down to what I think of as proper doom pace, almost struggling along, dragging its feet, but the clear vocals help to lift it out of the sludge, and for that I have to thank Stahl, who could have gone down the tried and tested route of doom vocalists, singing into his chest or even growling in a hard-to-understand guttural grunt, but he decided to make his lyrics audible and his vocals intelligible, which, allied to the mostly faster, almost standard metal tempo of Goatsnake's music, makes them a lot easier to get into than some doom bands I have tried (cough) Conan (cough) not naming any names...
But even when they slow down to a doom pace, Goatsnake seem to exhibit a kind of slow blues approach to their songs which lifts them out of the realm of the ordinary, often boring and often crushingly grinding doom metal bands. I admit I have no idea what “A truckload of mamma's muffins” is about (though probably linked in with drugs I assume?) but it sure is good fun. Hold on, let me just repeat that. It's fun. Fun. On a doom metal album? You had better believe it. If Goatsnake are doom, then they're no kind of doom I've ever heard, that's for sure. “Live to die”, despite its doomy title, is another song that's totally outside what I understand to be the doom metal tropes, with an upbeat bluesy guitar and harmonica, and the idea in the lyric of living today cos you might die tomorrow. Wot? No references to mausoleums, the futility of existence or the impossibility of the existence of God? No sharp knives, tortured souls or dark thoughts? Hey, works for me!
The closing track though, and the longest, the eight-minute “The river”, certainly returns to the expected drone and sludge of doom metal, with a more or less despairing lyric about giving up your life to float in the great river, surely a metaphor for suicide. It has dark, crunchy guitar stomping all through it, and even the vocal is more wailed than sung, so if there is a true doom metal song, then this final track is it, in everything: pace, length, vocal, guitar tempo and ideology. It shows that Goatsnake can certainly “doom it up” when they need to.
TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS
1. Flower of disease
2. Prayer for a dying
3. Easy greasy
4. El Coyote
5. The Dealer
6. A truckload of mamma's muffins
7. Live or die
8. The river
I had a feeling when I heard that first track Batty posted that I would like this band, and I definitely do. They put a whole new twist on the idea of doom metal, and to be honest, if I had not seen them definitively described as such I would not have labelled them that myself. Some great vocal work and some truly outside-the-box music, Goatsnake appear to be a band well worth checking out.