GOAT – The Gallows Pole OST (2023, Digital Self-Released)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Self-Released

Format: Digital, Bandcamp (LP scheduled for 2024)

Release Date: 7 July 2023

“The Gallows Pole” is GOAT’s second soundtrack album, following their score for the 2017 British independent horror film “Double Date”. Actually “The Gallows Pole” is a collaboration between Goat and English director, screenwriter, and actor, Shane Meadows…

Here’s a little info I gathered from their Bandcamp Page:

“The Gallows Pole’ is a three-part Element Pictures production, written and directed by Shane Meadows that is being aired in the UK on BBC Two with all episodes available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
This album includes five brand new tracks from the score and three existing tracks Shane Meadows selected from their back catalog.
The themes and imagery of Benjamin Myers’ source novel seem to be the perfect fit for the band’s mystical, pagan aesthetic, having cultivated a mythology of anonymity from the outset around the band hailing from the remote village of Korpilombo in northern Sweden.
The series, based in rural 18th century Yorkshire, tells a fictionalized tale based on the true story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, which became the biggest fraud in British history.
The talismanic ‘Let It Burn’, finding favor with BBC 6Music listeners when originally released as a standalone single in 2018, opens the soundtrack. This track was one of the key inspirations to Meadows as he was producing the series, and closes each episode.
The first original track ‘Mind Is Like The Sky’ sets the scene with an enveloping drone, intimating intrigue, and dread, across a languorous seven minutes. ‘Field Raga’ continues this tone, its strings and drones leading into a flutter of flute echoes. ‘Jazzman’ adds fingerpicked guitar to the mix, before opening up into a pastoral groove.
The album’s epic centerpiece is ‘The Gate Is Open (The Temple Lies Within)’, an eastern-tinged raga that takes nine and a half minutes to unfold. ‘Vallåt’ then brings us back down, a soothing coda of hypnotic clanks and chimes.
Rather than writing to picture in the traditional way, GOAT approached the creative process differently, explaining that: “In the beginning, we would get inspiration just through reading the book, trying to get a sense of its vibration and then translate that into music, with passages from the book as a springboard for those jams.”
In line with his usual working practice, Shane Meadows used the source tracks and new score for inspiration when editing the series. Music is deeply embedded in his projects, going back to the classic sync soundtrack to ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ in 2004.
GOAT were already fans of Meadows’ work, in particular, the various iterations of ‘This Is England’, and understood the importance of music to him, noting that: “Music is a central part to everything he has done” and describing it as a “blessing” when they were approached about the project.
The project also provided ongoing inspiration for GOAT, resulting in even more music that did not make the cut but may form the basis of future releases. “Although it may seem an abstract or unorthodox way to work with film, a lot of interesting music came out of those sessions,” said the band.
The final two existing tracks are ‘Fill My Mouth’, released in 2021 as an extra track for the compilation ‘Headsoup’, and the live favorite ‘Gathering of Ancient Tribes’, taken from their second album ‘Commune’. Sometimes, the results are best heard (and seen). As GOAT themselves conclude, “Music is never easily explained with words”. The score to ‘The Gallows Pole’ will be released digitally and on Bandcamp on 7 July, with a vinyl release to follow in 2024”…

So, “The Gallows Pole” consists of 5 original tunes written by the band to dress the TV episodes plus 3 more Goat tracks taken from the band’s past catalog. The 3 “older” tracks are, the opener “Let It Burn”, a hot-as-hell track, groovylicious and funk-a-delicious, fuzzy, tribal, and full of Modern Psych (originally released as single in 2018), “Fill My Mouth”, African-inspired Funky n’ Fuzzy – a – delic with one of the best magical trippy mind-bending Flute sounds (released in 2021), and the classic-by-now “Gathering Of The Ancient Tribes”, a track that sounds as a Tuareg band consumed a lot of “herbs” and they came to a psychedelic ecstasy (taken from magnificent “Commune” album from 2014). As far as the other 5 ‘new’ songs, all 5 of them can characterized as having the element of experimentation, “Mind Is Like The Sky” is a 10:56-minute track, full of Drone music, dark, new-age, creepy-like, and quite cinematic, of course. “Field Raga” is an incredible “isolated” and kind of cold n’ dark Folklore tune with a rather bucolic scenery created by the Flutes… “Jazzman” – my favorite highlight – starts in an acoustic way with the fingerpicked guitar, there’s an intense Psychic Echo all over that blends the Mynd, and as soon as the Beat/Groove takes the lead then all together create a unique Colorful Cosmic Psych Universe! It’s so hard to believe that this is a Goat tune, I love it! “The Gate Is Open (The Temple Lies Within)” is a long (9:28min) Raga-ish track with Middle Eastern influences all over, also West Africa ‘shines’ all over the track, someone could describe it as Modern African Psych! “Valat” is an experimental piece of ‘music’, of course, you can call it ‘no-music’, eerie percussion, a pastoral and folkish environment full of chimes and things-related… So, “The Gallows Pole” is a goddamn fine album, despite being a Soundtrack (!!!), and I will desperately waiting for the vinyl release… TimeLord Michalis  

Tracklist

Links

Listen / Buy through GOAT Bandcamp