Where to start with Goat Girl and why I've neglected their second album, the unfortunately named, On All Fours. There is only one place to start for me. With Susie Fenn. Susie Fenn was a girl I went to secondary school with. Almost forty years ago. Susie was an assured and attractive girl who poured a packet of sugar over my head in a Domestic Science for absolutely no reason. Simply because she could. Such stuff can cause lifetime scars of minor kinds. I'm fine of course, but I'll never forget it. It felt like a small and slightly painful initiation ritual into the world of adult relationships.Kids games of course compared with the incredible pain that can come later.
Now Susie Fenn really has nothing to do with Goat Girl at all. But when I saw them play at Cluny 2 in Newcastle a few years back, supporting someone, (I can't remember who), their stage demeanour reminded me of Susie Fenn. Of all the cool, surface confident and sometimes scary, (and certainly scarily attractive girls), I went to school with. I have a good friend who wonders why I like Siouxsie & the Banshees, or at least the early Siouxsie & the Banshees. It's because almost all of those girls made themselves up, or tried to make themselves up like Siouxsie did back in those days. Ready for battle.
So I've finally got round to On All Fours and I love it. I heard a song from it on the radio the other day which finally made me take the plunge. I've been playing it ever since. It's a small but specific marvel. A very interesting record. One of the best albums I've heard this year and that's a high compliment. There have been some really great ones already. It doesn't really remind me of Siouxsie and the Banshees at all. It reminds me most of all of Warpaint. Also the glossy surfaces of early and later Roxy Music. But really this is all Goat Girl's and its enormous credit to them. A mighty achievement so early in their career.
It's an enormous shift and expansion of sound and scope from their first, eponymous album, which came out a couple of years back. That was good in its way, a small quirky record, that made plenty of friends. This is something else. One which reaches and attains a grace and assurance they only hinted at there. This should win them a lot more and take them on to a new level if there's any justice in this world at all.
Some similar themes emerge here as with their first. Irritating men. Worse than irritating men and how to deal with them without submitting to their bullying ways. Not being down on all fours I suppose, there must be a reason for choosing a title like this, but I wonder what their mothers think! Goat Girl are certainly not submissive but they're not aggressive either. Their's is a swirling, immersive sound, glossy and seductive, enhanced by the neat electronic touches the band have added to and enhanced their sound with.
Politics too. The strange times we find ourselves in. In many ways the spiritual home of Goat Girl are the late Seventies and early Eighties. The height of Post Punk when similar ideas were being fielded on a regular basis. Round about the time Susie was pouring a packet of sugar over my head in the Domestic Science lab. But what differentiates Goat Girl from the usual Post Punk pack that so abound these days are that their influences are so difficult to trace and that's incredibly unusual these days.
Apart from Warpaint, and Warpaint are the obvious contemporary comparison, Goat Girl pretty much make their own scene. I'm sure they've listened to and taken notes from Warpaint records but there's nothing slavish here, (oh dear the submission thing again).Theirs is very much South Coast rather than West Coast. They inhabit their own space.
Thirteen tracks here but its a smooth and pleasurable ride. No jagged edges. Goat Girl have well and truly arrived and it will be incredibly interesting to see where they go from here. Time for me to put away foolish preconceptions and irrational prejudices. To forgive Susie Fenn, wherever she is and keep listening to this. It's fabulous. Simply!
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