Goat The Head is a Norwegian death metal band, ‘Simian Supremacy’ is the bands debut full length release and according to the cover it is brought to us ‘by means of primal caveman death metal’. This is a band that prides itself in being primitive in sound, the music is brutal and the bands caveman instincts certainly shine through strongly here. The caveman gimmick of this band is really quite an amusing one, due to the gimmicky nature of the bands approach however I fail really to ever take the music of this album particularly seriously. Fourteen tracks are contained within this ‘Simian Supremacy’ album, and with titles such as ‘Beast Man’, ‘Bone Throne’, and ‘Darwinian Minions’ the band is relentless in putting across its primitive point.
The music is kept simple at all times throughout this album, it’s quite an effective sound but always there is that underlying element of the caveman marketing strategy that has been used here. In all areas the music is quite well put across by the band, this is a decent display of extreme sound but I just wish the band didn’t feel the need to rely on a gimmick to sell records. Goat The Head is not really a band doing anything new, the sound created here merely sees the band recycling popular death metal guitar riffs of old and placing atop of this sound truly generic grunted and growled vocals. The lyrics are at times a little laughable here but in the main you can’t quite decipher what the bands singer is saying anyway so it doesn’t really matter. The titles of the tracks usually come across quite clearly in the vocals, other than that however you’ll have to strain your ears a lot if you’re wishing to make out the lyrical content of this album.
Goat The Head is a band that is relying very much on an extremely gimmicky approach, the band is signed to TABU Recordings and quite honestly I don’t know why the label saw it fit so sign them. The music is not bad as such here, it’s just not at all original and although when you listen to this album you’ll rise a wry smile; you’ll ultimately wonder why on earth the four members of this band are wasting their time and talents in a project of ‘contemporary primal caveman death metal’ when surely they could be using their musical expertise elsewhere and coming up with music that is a tad more original and a smidgeon less contrived.
If you think it’s cool to like such bands as Send More Paramedics and Cannibal Corpse then you’ll probably quite like the music of Goat The Head also. Whereas the other two bands mentioned deal with the subjects of cannibalism and zombies, Goat The Head instead choose cavemen as their gimmicky musical subject of choice and although it’s fun to listen to the bands music for a few minutes; it soon all becomes rather tiresome. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Simian Supremacy’ is not technically a particularly bad album but it’s certainly not at all original. Goat The Head should take their wooden clubs, remove their animal fur, return to the drawing board and have a little think about what they’ve come up with here; the stone age needs to be left well and truly behind and the four members of this band must really now move onto pastures new.
Label: TABU Recordings
Release Date: November 19th 2007
Rating:
UK based film graduate with a huge passion for music, sports and video games.
