GOATkRAfT
Bergen blasphemers seek more war-ravaged pastures
So many bands claim to make music that is raw, violent and blasphemous that those adjectives can begin to sound meaningless. But then you find your ears assailed by Goatkraft’s seething, riotously hellbound Angel Slaughter EP and, suddenly, everything starts to make sense again. Formed in Bergen, Norway little more than a year ago, this gruffly mysterious trio are proudly inspired by underground savagery from Brazil, Australia and North America, rather than the Norse old school.
“Our masterplan was to create aggressive music, record evil albums and to play gigs,” states frontman G. “The usual things for a war metal band, I guess. We had an urge to play more in a Blasphemy/Sarcofago/Black Witchery vein and we didn’t care about anything else. We didn’t want Goatkraft to be another band from Norway that plays ‘Norsk Black Metal’. As far as I know, we are the only band from Bergen who play this way, and probably the only one in Norway as well.”
Not quite 20 minutes of fullpelt scabrous noise, Angel Slaughter is clearly not the work of a band that gives two shits about pleasing anyone but themselves. Fortunately, that’s precisely the kind of myopic militancy that has long made war metal a subgenre that can be relied upon to deliver uncompromising extremity. Lyrically, too, it’s a metallic strain with little room for conceptual manoeuvre and with zero interest in broadening its reach. Not surprisingly, Goatkraft see this as a definite plus. So fuck you.
“We sing about death and destruction!” G. proclaims, proudly. “We are not trying to convey anything to people. We don’t care about people in general. Our music is directed to bestial black metal maniacs and they are the only ones that we care about as a band. They know what war metal is all about. For all the others, our music is just a common noise. Let it stay that way.”