REVIEW: The Goats, No Goats, No Glory (Ruffhouse/Columbia)
- Martin Bate
The Goats Tricks of The Shade debut was one of the best hip-hop albums of all time. It was a funny and funky political fairground ride through modern America in the guise of 'Uncle Scams Federally Funded Freak Show and Carnival'. Their live shows were incredible - barely organized chaos with Madd, Swayzack and Oatie rapping over a full live band (which makes its recorded debut here). Then Oatie left.......
No Goats, No Glory starts off well with "Wake'n'Bake", one of the best tributes to getting high that I've heard. With its blunted beats, live horns, humorous rap and "Late to bed means late to rise..." refrain, I'm smiling and nodding my head and thinking "Looks like I had nothing to worry about."
But as the album progresses I soon start to realize that this isn't the Goats we knew and loved on the first album and my joy turns to dismay. Madd and Swayzack still wreck shit stylistically and lyrically but there's little focus to the lyrics with most of the politics gone with Oatie, and leaving only repeated tales of getting high, claims of how dope they are and err....busting Nazis heads (admirable past-time but here it just comes off as an excuse for some gangsta-style violence).
Another big problem is the music. On record the band sound lumpen and dull - the guitars in particular seem to have little life and resort too often to bad rock guitar riffs. And when the live instrumentation is replaced by a more traditional hip-hop backing we get little more than second hand DJ Muggs beats. OK, but nothing new.
The biggest disappointment of all, however, is the lack of real substance offered here after the compendium of styles and moods of the debut. Of the 11 tracks listed on the cover, one is a short fairly hypocritical skit, one a nice but almost pointless instrumental, and another an eight-minute slow, beatless trawl through various spoken word samples which completely loses the momentum built up in the aggressive "Mutiny", the energetic Rage Against The Machine style dynamics and jazz inflections of "Rumblefish" and the *very* Souls Of Mischiefy (but thats OK) "Blind With Anger". This is the final straw and things never really recover.
In the end we're left with a good rap-with-touches-of-rock mini-album struggling to get out from underneath the extraneous filler added to make a full album. Wait for Oatie's next project, and just buy the singles off this.
