The Strange Girls - 2022 - It's OK To Be Happy (1999-2001)

Fördämning Arkiv – F-ARKIV 8

 The cover looks less like album artwork than a damaged memory somebody managed to rescue from a box. Two figures occupy an ordinary patch of grass near a hedge and a set of tall metal poles. One appears suspended in a rounded swing while the other stands farther back, but the photograph is too degraded to settle comfortably into description. Vertical scratches and seams divide the image into panels. Faces, gestures and distances have been partially swallowed by reproduction. It could be childhood documented from across a yard, a still from an abandoned home movie, or evidence from a day whose emotional importance was not understood until years later.

That uncertainty is an exact entrance into The Strange Girls. It’s OK To Be Happy gathers recordings made between 1999 and 2001 by Clayton Noone, Kaaterama “Motty” Morehu and Jon Arcus, three people in Dunedin making what Noone later called clean, chord-based country-rock songs. Clean is a wonderfully relative word here. The basic materials may be chord changes, guitars, drums and voices, but they reach us through muffled recording, tape damage, room sound and the unstable surfaces of New Zealand’s deep DIY underground. The songs are clean in intention, perhaps, while everything carrying them has acquired weather.

The first song, “Satan,” is also the first song from the first gig The Strange Girls ever played. That kind of beginning usually disappears. Bands rehearse, fail, reorganize themselves and later construct a cleaner origin story from whatever survives. Here the first public moment is placed at the entrance of an album assembled more than twenty years later. The recording does not arrive as an embarrassing preliminary sketch that must be excused before the mature work begins. It becomes the foundation stone.

Calling a first song “Satan” might suggest theatrical evil, metal spectacle or deliberate provocation, but The Strange Girls belonged to a musical culture where grand words could be placed inside deliberately reduced circumstances. Satan does not need thunder, fire or expensive production. The name can hang above a few people in a room, an unstable chord and a recording device struggling to contain what is happening. Cosmic conflict is brought down to household scale. The prince of darkness has arrived, but there may not be enough microphone cable.

That shrinking of mythology is part of the group’s beauty. Their songs carry titles such as “Control,” “Thug,” “In a Passionate Mood,” “Truly” and “Wasp,” words that appear direct enough to explain themselves until the music surrounds them with ambiguity. The Strange Girls do not build elaborate lyrical architecture around these terms. They let a small word sit inside damaged sound until it begins accumulating private associations. Control can mean discipline, emotional restraint, domination or the impossibility of holding a recording together. Truly can be an oath, a hesitation or the beginning of a sentence nobody manages to finish.

The group developed partly from the same Dunedin environment that allowed noise, folk, damaged pop and free playing to occupy the same social rooms. Noone’s earlier work in Armpit had embraced a more openly abrasive and collapsing form of rock. The Strange Girls did not abandon that freedom when they moved toward songs. They placed freedom inside the song form. Chords may be recognizable, but they are not required to behave professionally. Timing can sag, voices can sit behind the instruments, and distortion can obscure exactly the detail a commercial recording would have pulled forward.

This makes the album’s supposed country-rock identity especially interesting. Country music depends heavily upon direct emotional communication, familiar structures and the feeling that a song can be carried without elaborate equipment. The Strange Girls preserve those qualities while removing almost every guarantee normally attached to them. The listener receives the chord, ache and outline of the song, but the route has been damaged. It is country music transmitted through a wall, remembered after sleep or played from a cassette found beneath the seat of a car that no longer runs.

“Control” and “Girl by a Stream” establish the group’s ability to make repetition feel emotional rather than merely formal. Minor chords and persistent strumming do not necessarily lead toward a dramatic chorus or instrumental release. They create a place where feeling can remain without being resolved. “Girl by a Stream” is especially suggestive because the title offers an apparently peaceful image while the music belongs to a much more unstable emotional climate. A stream moves continuously, but the person beside it may be unable to move at all.

The Strange Girls’ lo-fi character is not only an aesthetic surface. It preserves the social conditions under which the music existed. These recordings were not waiting for a larger industry to notice and complete them. They circulated through tiny editions, lathe-cut records, cassettes and CD-Rs, formats that could be produced because someone cared enough to manufacture a small number without needing permission from a market. A song might reach twenty people, then disappear into cupboards, private collections and obsolete computer drives. Scarcity was not always manufactured exclusivity. Sometimes it was simply the natural size of the available machinery.

Root Don Lonie for Cash, the label Noone operated, belonged to that homemade ecology. Its name already rejects clean cultural presentation. It sounds like a mistranslated business instruction, a memorial to an unknown person, or a demand written on the back of a photograph. The label issued music because music had been made, not because every release could be translated into a stable product identity. Cassettes, tiny CD-Rs and lathe cuts became containers for whatever had happened recently enough to preserve.

The Strange Girls sound deeply connected to that attitude. They are not careless, but they do not equate care with correction. A recording can contain noise and still be treated as precious. A voice can be hard to hear and still carry the song. A photograph can be scratched almost beyond recognition and still deserve the front cover. Preservation does not always restore an object to imagined perfection. Sometimes it protects the damage because the damage is part of the object’s journey.

“Thug” and “Lyric” close the first side at opposite scales. “Thug” receives enough time to establish weight and atmosphere, while “Lyric” lasts less than two minutes, almost as though the title names a fragment rescued without the larger song that once surrounded it. Placing a piece called “Lyric” inside music whose words may be partially obscured is quietly funny. The lyric exists, but it refuses to behave like the sole delivery system for meaning. Guitar texture, tape grain and the distance of the voice communicate alongside language.

The second side opens with “In a Passionate Mood,” another title that sounds unusually formal for such weather-beaten music. Passion is not presented as operatic display. It is a condition the recording enters while remaining physically restrained. This may be one reason the album feels more emotionally convincing than records that announce feeling through technical emphasis. The Strange Girls do not increase fidelity, vocal volume or arrangement size to prove that passion has arrived. The mood exists within the same modest equipment and bodily limitations as everything else.

“OK” sits near the center of the album’s philosophy. Those two letters can mean genuine acceptance, reluctant agreement, emotional survival or the smallest answer a person can give when language is exhausted. It is not the same as excellent, healed, triumphant or complete. OK is sufficient. The title of the collection works similarly. It’s OK To Be Happy does not order anyone to become happy or claim that happiness erases sorrow. It grants permission.

That permission becomes more complicated because the collection appeared after Motty Morehu’s death in 2019. The title does not transform into grief merely because we know one of the central musicians had died, but knowledge changes the light around it. These recordings contain a living person singing and playing during years when nobody involved knew exactly how the material would later be assembled or heard. Happiness, preserved beside absence, does not betray the person who is gone. It becomes part of what their life continues giving.

This may be the most generous meaning available in the title. Grief can make happiness feel disloyal, as though continuing to experience pleasure reduces the seriousness of the loss. It’s OK To Be Happy rejects that hidden punishment. The life mattered enough to produce music, friendship, jokes, performances and memories. The loss remains enormous because those things existed. Happiness afterward does not cancel the price. It carries evidence of what made the price so high.

“Sleep” deepens that atmosphere through its very smallness. Sleep is restoration, disappearance, vulnerability and a rehearsal for absence, all contained in an ordinary nightly act. In lo-fi recording, sleep also describes the state of many sounds on the tape. Details seem buried but not dead. They can be awakened by attention. A voice that initially appears too distant begins to reveal shape after repeated listening. Noise once heard as interference becomes the room itself breathing around the performance.

“Truly” follows with a title that seeks certainty but cannot guarantee it. Truth in these recordings does not depend upon pristine documentation. The microphone may distort, the source may be many generations removed and the circumstances may be poorly remembered, yet the performance still tells the truth that it occurred. Three people occupied a room, listened to one another and produced something that could not be recreated after the fact.

“Wasp” closes the album with the smallest creature and the longest running time. A wasp can be nearly invisible until its sound enters the room, at which point attention becomes absolute. It is delicate, mechanical, social and dangerous. That makes it a useful final emblem for The Strange Girls. Their music is physically modest but difficult to ignore once heard properly. It carries a buzz inside the song form, an irritation or electric life that prevents the chords from becoming comfortable background.

The sequence is carefully shaped enough to feel like the band’s lost first album rather than a historical folder arranged by date. This is an important distinction. Chronology would tell us what happened in order; sequencing tells us what the surviving material can become now. The 2022 edition does not pretend the trio consciously recorded these ten songs as one LP. It asks whether an album was latent inside the scattered archive, waiting for somebody with enough distance to recognize its outline.

Fördämning Arkiv was especially suited to that work. The Swedish label emerged from a fascination with small-edition New Zealand releases, including lathe cuts whose obscurity was part of their actual manufacturing history rather than a later collector mythology. The geographical distance is beautiful: music made privately in Dunedin at the turn of the millennium is gathered two decades later by listeners in Gothenburg, pressed into five hundred LPs and sent outward again.

That route demonstrates how underground culture actually survives. It is rarely a straight ascent from obscurity to recognition. The music passes sideways through enthusiasts, trades, blogs, packages, old hard drives, record shops and people who remember names that search engines barely recognize. One person’s private enthusiasm becomes another person’s label project. A photograph is located. A musician writes notes. Someone masters the damaged recordings without bleaching away their age. The album that never existed begins occupying shelves.

The cover preserves that sideways movement. Its image does not promote the musicians or establish a fashionable visual identity. It withholds almost everything. We see distance, play equipment, vegetation and people whose identities have been softened by reproduction. The photograph’s damage resembles the music’s recording texture, but neither should be mistaken for emptiness. The missing information creates attention. We look harder because the image will not surrender itself immediately.

A swing is also an ideal object for music assembled from repetition. It travels forward and backward without progressing geographically, yet every return is altered by momentum, gravity and the body. Songs like these can circle a few chords for minutes without remaining still. Each repetition carries the memory of the previous one. The listener changes while the figure moves through the same arc.

The title therefore contains a larger philosophy of underground music. It is acceptable for art to be small, damaged, sincere, funny, emotionally excessive and technically incomplete. It is acceptable for a group to leave behind scattered objects rather than a career shaped for historical convenience. It is acceptable for happiness to appear inside downer rock, and for sadness to remain inside an album whose name offers permission to feel otherwise.

Motty’s death closed one version of The Strange Girls, but it did not erase the relationships preserved in these tapes. Jon Arcus’s departure after the early trio period did not make these years preliminary or lesser. Clayton Noone’s later work did not replace what happened here. Every phase remains complete in the particular connections it formed.

It’s OK To Be Happy is valuable because it does not clean those connections into a conventional origin story. It leaves the scratches on the photograph, the muffling around the voice and the uncertainty around the scene. We are allowed to receive the music without owning every fact that produced it. Somewhere inside the grain, three people are still playing the first song at their first gig, before any of them knows how far the sound will travel.

Blod - 2022 - Pilgrimssanger

Discreet Music – 08

 The church on the cover is almost aggressively ordinary. No soaring Gothic ceiling, stained-glass revelation or divine light descends from above. A small cross stands on an altar inside a room containing plain chairs, narrow windows and the accumulated quiet of local meetings. The image has been reduced to a rough burgundy screenprint, its details partially swallowed by ink until the sanctuary resembles a memory of a photograph rather than a photograph itself. BLOD and PILGRIMSSÅNGER are written around it in uneven letters that appear handmade, patient and slightly vulnerable. This is not Christianity presented as empire, spectacle or architectural triumph. It is Christianity as a room people must unlock, heat, clean, arrange and return to week after week.

Pilgrimssånger means “pilgrim songs,” but the journey here does not cross exotic continents or dramatic wilderness. It moves through parish halls, small congregations, family histories, awkward singing, loneliness, obedience, communal warmth and fear. Gustaf Dicksson approaches Swedish Christian culture through the modest sounds by which belief enters everyday life: upright organ, piano, acoustic guitar, recorder, uncomplicated percussion and voices that do not conceal their human limits. These are not concert-hall settings of sacred material. They resemble songs performed by people who sing because singing together is part of how they remain together.

That resemblance produces immediate uncertainty. Is Blod reconstructing a beloved form, examining its damage, parodying its mannerisms or surrendering sincerely to its promise? The album refuses to choose one position for the listener. Reverence and discomfort coexist. A melody can be tender enough to sound inherited from childhood, while the recording around it feels unstable enough to suggest that childhood has become difficult to revisit. The organ can offer shelter and confinement in the same chord. A communal voice can mean fellowship, social pressure or both at once.

This ambiguity is not a weakness in the album’s point of view. It may be the point. Religious life rarely divides cleanly into faith on one side and criticism on the other. A person can love the songs, distrust the leader, believe in God, fear the congregation, remember genuine kindness and carry injuries received beneath the same roof. Pilgrimssånger treats parish culture as a complete human environment rather than a theological position to approve or reject. The music recognizes that belief is lived among personalities, habits, authority structures, shared meals, private prayers and ordinary failures.

“Tänder ett ljus,” “Lights a Candle,” begins with the smallest possible act of illumination. A candle does not defeat darkness. It changes the immediate relationship to it. Its light is local, temporary and physically dependent upon a wick that consumes itself while shining. That makes it a more suitable emblem for Blod than a triumphant sunrise. Dicksson’s fragile voice, the slow piano movement and the modest organ tones do not announce certainty. They create enough warmth for a person to remain present.

Lighting a candle is also something one can do when language has failed. It may accompany prayer, mourning, gratitude or the simple recognition that somebody matters. The act does not require a complete explanation of suffering before it can be performed. Pilgrimssånger repeatedly values these small devotional gestures over large doctrinal declarations. The person may not understand the entire darkness, but can still place a light inside it.

The roughness of the performance is essential. A more technically accomplished singer might transform the song into an interpretation, inviting admiration for control and emotional delivery. Dicksson’s voice sounds closer to participation. He does not stand apart from the congregation as its appointed professional. He sounds like another person in the room, singing because the song would be incomplete if everyone waited for the best singer to begin.

“Du kan sjunga fritt,” “You Can Sing Freely,” extends that invitation. Freedom here does not mean unlimited virtuosity or self-expression detached from other people. It means that an imperfect voice is permitted to enter. Within a church setting, congregational singing creates a peculiar equality. Trained and untrained voices occupy the same melody, and individual errors may disappear inside the collective body. The song belongs to everyone capable of breath.

Yet singing freely inside a community always contains a tension. The person is free to sing, but generally within words, beliefs and melodies already chosen. The congregation offers a language through which emotion can be expressed, while also establishing the boundaries of acceptable expression. Blod’s loose timing and unstable instrumentation make that contradiction audible. The song carries communal encouragement, but the edges refuse complete obedience.

The guest voices help prevent the album from becoming a solitary artist’s impression of fellowship. Elin Engström and Anna Johannesson do not appear as polished choir singers placed behind a principal performer. Their voices and percussion widen the social field. The ensemble sounds assembled from people who know the material well enough to join but not so professionally drilled that every human difference has been removed.

“Blodspilar” is brief and outwardly cheerful, built from rickety drums, organ, guitar and recorder. The recorder is a particularly potent sound in this context. For many listeners it carries childhood, school music, beginner technique and communal education. It is one of the first instruments given to children because producing a recognizable note requires relatively little machinery, though producing a beautiful one remains another matter entirely.

Blod does not clean the recorder of those associations. Its innocence remains slightly awkward, which gives the piece a peculiar honesty. The music sounds like a small group attempting something larger than its resources, and that attempt becomes more affecting than perfect execution would have been. Faith communities have often produced records under exactly those conditions. People with limited equipment and technique made music because the message mattered more than whether the wider culture considered the result accomplished.

Collectors later call such records private press, outsider, devotional folk or amateur psych, turning sincere local artifacts into desirable aesthetic objects. Pilgrimssånger is aware of that history but does not merely imitate its surface. Dicksson understands that the unevenness cannot be applied like a filter. It must emerge from actual risk, from allowing vulnerable performances to remain exposed rather than correcting them into tasteful lo-fi decoration.

“En sång till Afrika,” “A Song to Africa,” introduces one of the record’s most uncomfortable parish memories. Christian congregations throughout Europe and North America have long constructed distant places as recipients of missionary concern, charitable imagination and simplified moral stories. Africa can become less a continent of countless cultures and histories than a symbolic location onto which the congregation projects generosity, danger, poverty, conversion and its own spiritual importance.

The title’s wording is revealing. It is not necessarily a song from Africa or with Africa, but a song directed toward it. Distance remains intact. The people singing may care sincerely while knowing remarkably little about the people imagined on the other side of the song. Love can cross distance, but so can paternalism. Pilgrimssånger does not need to issue a verdict for that tension to become present. The handmade innocence of parish music can carry assumptions much larger than its performers understand.

This is one of the album’s deeper truths about community. Harm is not always delivered by people who feel hateful. It may travel through inherited ideas, benevolent language and institutions convinced of their own goodness. At the same time, imperfect understanding does not automatically make every act of care false. People donate, pray, travel, build relationships and sacrifice because they genuinely believe another life matters. The moral difficulty lies in separating love from the structures that redirect it toward control.

“Kärlek och förståelse,” “Love and Understanding,” begins the second half by naming two values almost nobody would openly oppose. Yet the music is among the album’s most agitated. Recorder, forceful drums, distorted guitar and dramatic keyboard strikes turn a reassuring phrase into a much more volatile demand. Love and understanding sound simple when printed on a church banner. They become difficult when applied to real people whose pain, choices or doubts disturb the community’s order.

Understanding requires listening beyond the point of comfort. Love requires accepting that the person being loved may not become the person the institution hoped to produce. The song’s heavier arrangement seems to press against the gap between declared values and lived practice. The words remain beautiful, but beauty alone does not guarantee their fulfillment.

This is where Blod’s method of finding beautiful things inside ugly contexts becomes especially clear. The album does not expose contradiction in order to announce that sincerity is foolish. It protects sincerity from the systems that repeatedly misuse it. Love and understanding remain valuable precisely because institutions so often invoke them without paying their full cost. The music becomes rougher as if trying to rescue the words from their decorative use.

“Låt kärleken slå rot,” “Let Love Take Root,” returns to organic imagery. A root is hidden work. It grows beneath visibility, draws nourishment, stabilizes the plant and allows future life to rise above ground. Asking love to take root is different from asking it to appear. Appearance can be immediate and performative. Rooted love requires time, soil, repetition and care beyond the moment when anybody is watching.

The metaphor also accepts that love is affected by where it is planted. Community can provide rich ground, or it can constrict the roots until growth becomes distorted. Faith can nourish love through service, forgiveness and recognition of sacred value in other people. It can also become entangled with fear, authority and exclusion. The song’s modest scale prevents the image from becoming a slogan. It sounds less like a command to others than a prayer that love might survive the conditions surrounding it.

“Vårens första skratt,” “The First Laugh of Spring,” introduces joy without pretending winter never existed. The first laugh matters because silence and cold preceded it. Spring does not erase the season that came before; it proves that the previous condition was not permanent. Pilgrimssånger’s joy works in this seasonal way. It is not an uninterrupted spiritual mood available to anyone with sufficient faith. It appears briefly within anxiety, isolation and doubt.

A church community can produce this kind of joy through surprisingly ordinary means. Someone arrives early with coffee. A child laughs during a solemn moment. An elderly person is remembered. Voices that sounded weak individually become strong together. A person who spent the week alone is addressed by name. None of these acts solves the theological or institutional problems surrounding them. Their goodness remains real anyway.

That refusal to surrender genuine goodness to criticism is one of the album’s strongest qualities. It would be easy to make parish culture grotesque, naïve or sinister. It would be equally easy to romanticize it as a lost world of fellowship. Dicksson allows kindness and discomfort to remain attached. The congregation can wound and shelter, sometimes through the same relationships.

“Oroskällan” closes the album by moving away from the folk and parish-band arrangements into a more meditative electronic space. The title can be translated as “The Source of Anxiety” or “The Well of Worry,” and it carries an additional connection to Dicksson’s collaborative project of the same name. Synthesizer tones establish a dark, slowly changing environment while his voice becomes almost conversational. After an album of communal forms, the listener is left near the private origin of fear.

Anxiety often behaves like a source of water hidden underground. A person experiences its effects long before locating where it begins. It feeds thoughts, physical sensations, avoidance and interpretations of the world, but the source may be inaccessible or distributed across many earlier experiences. Religion can offer language for bringing that anxiety before God. It can also enlarge anxiety through judgment, impossible standards and the fear that doubt itself is a moral failure.

The closing piece does not resolve this contradiction. Its electronics create a space closer to solitary contemplation than collective worship. The parish room has emptied. Chairs remain in rows, but the person who stayed behind can no longer rely upon everyone else’s singing to carry the melody. Faith must now survive contact with the nervous system of one individual.

This movement from candle to anxiety gives the album a quiet narrative. It begins with an action that creates light and ends by descending toward the place from which darkness rises. Between those points, people sing freely, attempt communal joy, imagine distant service, ask for love and wait for spring. Pilgrimage is revealed not as steady progress toward spiritual certainty, but as repeated movement between fellowship and solitude.

The cover room contains that entire journey. During worship it may fill with music and bodies. Later it becomes empty architecture. The cross remains whether the individual feels anything or not. For some believers, that continuity offers reassurance: faith does not depend upon emotional intensity. For others, the same fixed symbol can feel indifferent to human distress. The screenprint holds both possibilities. Its dark ink surrounds the altar while also defining the light areas through which the room remains visible.

The handmade sleeve, lyric booklet and insert extend the parish aesthetic into the object itself. This is not sacred music packaged as luxury transcendence. The physical record resembles something produced by a small community with available tools. Screenprinted color varies, ink carries texture, and the accompanying texts require the listener to handle separate pieces. The record becomes less a finished commodity than a small kit for assembling attention.

That presentation also fits Discreet Music’s broader role in Gothenburg. The label and shop operate as infrastructure for artists whose work may not fit cleanly into ordinary markets. There is a parallel with parish culture here. Both create rooms, maintain networks, gather people, distribute objects and depend upon labor that may remain invisible to outsiders. One structure is religious and the other artistic, but both ask what can be sustained when participants contribute because the activity matters beyond immediate profit.

Blod belongs to the orbit around Förlag För Fri Musik, Enhet För Fri Musik and other overlapping Gothenburg projects where songs, noise, home recording, folk memory and social relationships continually pass through one another. Pilgrimssånger does not approach church music from an isolated academic distance. It treats parish forms as another vernacular tradition available for lived, imperfect reuse.

The word “pilgrim” finally becomes important because a pilgrim is neither settled nor entirely lost. A destination is believed to exist, but the road still has to be walked through weather, exhaustion and uncertainty. Pilgrimage allows doubt to become part of movement rather than proof that movement has failed. The person can fear, question, stop, receive help and begin again.

Pilgrimssånger does not demand that the listener share its belief. It asks the listener to recognize what belief feels like when carried by ordinary people rather than represented by institutions speaking at maximum volume. It can sound hopeful, embarrassing, consoling, coercive, childish and profound within the same few minutes because religious life has always contained those contradictions.

The album’s imperfections protect it from becoming propaganda. Propaganda presents certainty without cost. These songs crack, drift and strain. Their belief is audible alongside the difficulty of believing. The people represented here are not marching confidently toward heaven. They are trying to keep one another company while travelling in its direction.

That may be why the record’s light feels credible. It is not the light of someone who has never encountered darkness. It is the candle lit by someone who knows the room will become dark again and chooses to light it anyway. The flame will consume itself. The congregation will eventually disperse. Leaders will fail, children will grow into questions, and every voice will one day leave the room.

Still, the song is sung. Somebody hears it. Love is asked to take root in imperfect soil, and for a moment several fragile voices become one body without ceasing to be fragile. Pilgrimssånger finds holiness not in escaping that condition, but in continuing together through it.

Goat - 2022 - Oh Death

Rocket Recordings – LAUNCH287

 The title says death, but the cover refuses to dress for a funeral. Enormous legs in red shoes frame a crowded ceremonial scene. Goat heads guard a triangular structure crowned by a white tooth. Piano keys form roads and floors beneath bodies, horns, animal shapes, staring eyes and repeated patterns that seem capable of reproducing forever. Everything is eating, dancing, falling, watching or being transformed into something else. Death has entered, but it cannot persuade anybody to sit still.

That visual contradiction is the album’s governing energy. Oh Death does not treat mortality as blankness, silence or final withdrawal. It treats death as one stage inside a larger circulation of bodies, rhythm and matter. A person disappears, but the beat has already entered other people. The living carry gestures, stories, fears, melodies and physical habits inherited from those who are gone. Goat’s answer to death is therefore not denial. It is intensified participation. If life is temporary, then the drums must be struck while hands are available.

This was the group’s first full studio album in six years. Their previous record had been called Requiem, which made the long silence afterward appear suspiciously conclusive. A band already hidden behind masks, shifting identities and a deliberately unreliable origin mythology could have vanished without issuing a formal explanation. Instead, Goat returned with an album whose opening song is called “Soon You Die,” as though the appropriate way to announce survival were to remind everyone that survival remains temporary.

The record begins with a fragment of the old childhood rhyme about seeing a hearse and realizing that one day it will carry you. It is a morbid piece of playground folklore, death converted into something children can repeat rhythmically before they fully understand its scale. Goat immediately turns that memento mori into propulsion. Drums begin advancing, fuzz guitar tears across the stereo field, and the voices reduce mortality to a blunt communal chant. You will die. The reason may remain unavailable. The useful question is what the body does before then.

“Soon You Die” contains the whole album in miniature. The opening words establish inevitability, but the music refuses paralysis. Guitar bends and scorches with the extravagant physicality associated with Eddie Hazel, while the percussion behaves less like accompaniment than a crowd gathering around the song. Goat’s singers do not offer the private confession of a single narrator. Their voices arrive as proclamations, warnings and shared instructions. The self becomes less important than the ritual passing through it.

The masks matter here. Rock music often teaches listeners to connect every sound to an identifiable personality, biography and marketable face. Goat continually interrupts that transaction. The costumes may create spectacle, but anonymity also shifts attention away from the ordinary celebrity machinery that converts music into an extension of individual fame. The musicians become temporary occupants of roles. A performer can leave, another can enter, and Goat remains a larger creature whose exact anatomy is intentionally difficult to confirm.

That does not mean there are no individuals inside the music. The playing is too physically specific for that. Hands strike skins, fingers pull strings, and voices strain against the force surrounding them. But the album treats individuality as something contributed to collective motion rather than something elevated above it. The rhythm does not ask who receives credit for beginning the dance. It asks whether everyone else will enter.

“Chukua Pesa” contracts the opening explosion into a shorter, more hypnotic piece. Its title is Swahili and can be read as an instruction involving taking money, placing commerce beside an album preoccupied with death, nationhood, blessing and impermanence. Money is one of humanity’s great attempts to make value portable and survivable. It can cross distances, outlive owners and continue directing behavior after the labor that produced it has been forgotten. Goat places the phrase inside a piece that feels older and stranger than any financial system, letting repetition expose how temporary the supposedly permanent arrangements of society may be.

The group’s use of sounds associated with African music has always been central to both its appeal and the questions surrounding it. Goat describes its music as world music in the most literal sense, a field in which psych rock, funk, folk, jazz, post-punk and geographically dispersed rhythmic traditions can interact. That openness can be exhilarating, but it should not turn distinct musical cultures into anonymous mystical ingredients. Oh Death is strongest when its references behave as active relationships rather than exotic decorations, when the musicians acknowledge through their playing that every rhythm arrived through actual communities, histories and people.

“Under No Nation” makes that refusal of borders explicit. The bass and drums produce a severe, elastic funk while guitar arrives in compact scratches, fuzz detonations and wah-wah pressure. The title imagines freedom from the nation as an organizing identity, but the song does not replace politics with passive universalism. Its groove feels demanding. To stand under no nation means losing the protection, mythology and ready-made belonging a nation supplies, while also escaping the command to treat strangers as enemies because a border assigned them elsewhere.

Goat announced the song through one of their deliberately ridiculous myths, claiming that the gods had delivered its manuscript at a drunken Round Table of Funk because humanity needed to start grooving properly again. The joke contains a serious idea. Dance can produce a temporary form of citizenship. People with incompatible languages and histories can agree upon pulse before they agree upon doctrine. For several minutes, the body belongs less to a nation than to the rhythm moving through the room.

That does not make dance politically innocent. Music can be marketed, stripped of context and used to sell fantasies of borderless togetherness while the musicians and traditions being borrowed remain unequally valued. Goat’s costume mythology risks encouraging listeners to hear all non-Western reference points as one generalized zone of ritual mystery. Yet the unruliness of the actual recordings repeatedly exceeds that simplification. The music does not become a smooth multicultural showroom. Its ingredients scrape against one another, preserving difference through friction.

“Do the Dance” turns instruction into gleeful coercion. Its heavy double-drum stomp carries a touch of glam rock and the martial bounce associated with Adam and the Ants, but Goat stuffs that framework with enough percussion and shrieking color to make the historical reference unstable. The song knows there is something faintly absurd about demanding spontaneous movement. Dancing is supposed to be freedom, yet someone is giving orders. The contradiction becomes part of the fun.

The title can also be heard as the simplest answer to mortality on the record. Theology may remain uncertain. The cause of death may be hidden. History may misidentify what a life contributed. But a living body can still move beside another living body. Dance is meaning produced without waiting for a complete explanation. It does not defeat death, but it prevents death from owning the whole interval before its arrival.

“Apegoat” provides the first short rupture in the sequence. These compact transitional pieces are important because Oh Death is mixed and arranged with almost comical density. The major tracks arrive packed with percussion, distorted guitars, voices, horns and effects. Without openings in the structure, the album’s intensity could become a single unbroken surface. “Apegoat” creates a side chamber where the listener can briefly examine the strange architecture before being pulled back into it.

The word itself joins evolutionary ancestry to the band’s chosen animal. Goat’s mythology frequently treats human, animal and spirit as porous categories. The cover performs the same operation, merging limbs, horns, faces, teeth and instruments until identity becomes anatomical collage. This is not nature presented as a peaceful alternative to civilization. Nature on Oh Death is appetite, reproduction, decay, pleasure and mutation. The goat does not symbolize innocence. It survives by eating almost anything.

“Goatmilk” begins the second half with one of the album’s richest mixtures of groove and woodwind color. Flute and saxophone loosen the hard edges of the rhythm while also opening a route toward free jazz. The title suggests nourishment produced by the group’s own symbolic animal, as though Goat has become both performer and food source. Milk sustains early life, but here it is delivered through fuzz, breath and rhythmic pressure rather than pastoral calm.

The horns do not behave as expensive ornaments brought in to certify musical sophistication. They seem to have grown inside the percussion. Their phrases can be melodic, abrasive or environmental, moving between recognizable jazz language and the cries of instruments being tested at their physical borders. Goat’s greatest arrangements often make it impossible to tell whether a sound has entered as foreground or atmosphere. By the time the ear identifies it, it has already changed the behavior of the whole track.

“Blow the Horns” makes that instruction explicit and then couples it with a lyric concerning the arrival of a child. Birth and announcement have long belonged together. Horns call communities toward ceremonies, danger, worship, war and royal arrival. Here the birth does not contradict the album’s fixation on death. It completes it. Every birth introduces another death into the future, but it also enlarges love, responsibility and possibility in the present.

The guitar harmonies briefly recall the paired leads of Thin Lizzy, a reference that sounds almost startlingly conventional inside Goat’s shifting world. Yet those harmonies are not used to stabilize the music into classic-rock familiarity. They become another bright ceremonial language passing through. Goat can absorb a recognizable rock gesture without allowing it to dictate the song’s entire identity.

This is one reason Oh Death avoids sounding like a collection of record-shop references despite the ease with which individual influences can be named. Eddie Hazel, Afrobeat, desert blues, free jazz, post-punk, glam, folk ritual and psychedelic rock are all audible, but Goat does not line them up chronologically or respectfully. The band treats recorded history as simultaneous. Music from different decades and regions arrives in the same present because that is how listening actually works now. A person can encounter a Malian guitarist, a New York no-wave record, a Swedish folk melody and a Detroit funk solo within the same hour.

The danger of this simultaneity is that history can flatten into style. The achievement is that Goat often prevents that flattening through sheer commitment to physical groove. These are not references pasted onto a neutral indie-rock foundation. The rhythm changes the foundation itself. Funk is not a guitar effect; it is the relationship among bass, drums, silence and bodily expectation. Free jazz is not a burst of random saxophone; it is permission for instrumental voices to create structure through friction. Folk is not an acoustic interlude; it is material that survives because communities keep carrying it.

“Remind Yourself” is among the album’s clearest pieces of advice. Its rhythm has the playful, interlocking quality of early-1980s New York records where funk, post-punk and dance music were not yet patrolling their borders carefully. The song’s title is incomplete enough to remain useful. Remind yourself of what? That you will die, that the body is alive, that identity is temporary, that another person exists beyond your interpretation, or that joy requires active recollection?

Memory is not passive storage. A person repeatedly reconstructs the past according to present needs. Goat’s masks make that process theatrical. The band invents histories, repeats myths and refuses to clarify where documentary fact ends. This could be dismissed as gimmickry, but it also mirrors how communities create themselves. Shared identity depends upon stories people agree to carry, even when those stories contain exaggeration, contradiction and symbolic truth rather than courtroom accuracy.

“Blessings” lasts barely more than a minute and ends with piano, a surprisingly exposed sound after so much amplified pressure. A blessing is another act whose effects cannot be measured reliably. Someone speaks care toward another person without knowing whether the words will protect them, change them or even be remembered. The value lies partly in the giving. A blessing sends hope beyond the giver’s control.

The piano sounds almost domestic, as though the public ritual has briefly moved into a smaller room. Goat’s scale contracts from masked festival spectacle to keys being struck one at a time. This change does not expose the larger tracks as false. Ceremony and intimacy are not enemies. The enormous dance may be built from countless private acts of attention, just as a crowd is made from individual bodies that will eventually disappear separately.

“Passes Like Clouds” closes the album by allowing the forward charge to drift into desert-blues space. The title supplies the record’s gentlest account of impermanence. Clouds do not fail when they change shape or vanish. Passing is their nature. They hold water temporarily, alter light, cast shadows and travel beyond the observer’s horizon. Human life is more painful because consciousness attaches itself to continuity, but the same principle remains: form gathers, affects its surroundings and disperses.

The song does not end with a funeral march or final verdict. It moves outward. Guitar lines hover above a patient pulse, and the feverish density of the earlier tracks gives way to distance. After an album that repeatedly places mortality inside the body, “Passes Like Clouds” relocates it into weather. Death is no longer only the future event waiting for each person. It is the continuous transformation already occurring in cells, relationships, generations and memory.

That movement gives Oh Death an arc without turning it into a formal concept album. “Soon You Die” begins with the blunt recognition of individual mortality. “Blow the Horns” announces birth. “Blessings” sends care toward an uncertain future. “Passes Like Clouds” accepts the changing of form. Between them, dancing provides the connective tissue. Life does not pause until the philosophy has been completed.

The artwork by Felicia Nilsson and Tobias Ekberg makes this cycle visible without illustrating any single song. Teeth recur throughout the image, including the enormous tooth at the top of the triangular structure. A tooth is part of a living body, an instrument of eating, and one of the last recognizable parts to survive after softer tissue disappears. It belongs equally to appetite and archaeology. Placing it above the scene turns consumption into a kind of crown.

The large red shoes at the sides are equally ambiguous. They could belong to dancers, giants, gods or spectators whose bodies extend outside the available frame. The album’s world continues beyond the sleeve. We see only the portion of the ceremony that fits inside the object. This mirrors Goat’s anonymity. The visible performance is real, but it is never offered as the complete body behind the sound.

The black-and-white keyboard beneath the figures turns music into terrain. Bodies dance upon it, collapse across it and emerge from it. Instruments are not separate tools operated from a safe human distance. Music is the ground on which these creatures exist. The cover refuses the polite image of musicians standing beside equipment. Everything has become entangled in the act of sounding.

Chris Reeder’s gatefold design gives the illustration enough physical space to remain overwhelming. On a small digital square, the image appears as a concentrated psychedelic commotion. Across an LP sleeve, the repeated line work, tiny faces, anatomical jokes and ceremonial details become a world that can be explored while the record plays. Different vinyl colors, including orange and cloudberry-like swirls, extend the artwork’s heat into the object itself.

Goat recorded at Parkeringshuset Studio and produced the album collectively, preserving the group identity instead of assigning the music to a named central author. Linus Andersson mastered it at Elementstudio. The lack of conventional personnel credits is consistent with the masks, but it also makes the record difficult to discuss using rock criticism’s preferred method of attaching every sound to a biography. We hear the action clearly while the people producing it remain deliberately blurred.

This creates an interesting reversal. Celebrity culture gives us enormous quantities of personal information while often concealing the collaborative labor behind a finished record. Goat withholds personal identity but foregrounds collective action. The mystery is partly manufactured, of course, and anonymity itself can become a highly recognizable brand. Yet it still interrupts the expectation that listeners are owed complete access to the private selves of artists.

The Korpilombolo origin story should be understood within that mythology. Goat has repeatedly presented itself as emerging from a northern Swedish community shaped by generations of musical and spiritual exchange, but the tale functions less as verifiable local history than as the band’s creation story. Its value lies in what it allows Goat to question: whether a group must have a stable beginning, whether identity belongs to individuals or traditions, and whether myth can communicate something that literal autobiography cannot.

Myth becomes dangerous when it disguises appropriation or converts other peoples into atmosphere. It becomes useful when it reveals that every supposedly ordinary identity is already built from inherited stories. Goat lives directly inside that tension. The band’s imagery draws freely from spiritual, folk and psychedelic sources without offering a tidy guide to their origins. A listener can enjoy the ecstatic result while remaining attentive to the real histories beneath the collage.

Oh Death works because the music never asks theory to perform the body’s labor. Whatever questions surround the imagery, the record must still move, and it does. The bass repeatedly finds the exact place where stiffness gives way to dance. The drums create forward force without flattening the percussion into a metronomic grid. The guitars treat distortion as color, friction and heat. The singers refuse the psychologically detailed first-person style dominant in much contemporary songwriting, favoring short phrases that can be shouted by people who arrived without lyric sheets.

This produces an album that feels communal without requiring a community to agree upon every meaning. One person may hear spiritual rebirth, another a record assembled from beloved psychedelic and funk artifacts, another a critique of borders, and another simply an exceptionally lively half-hour. The groove holds those interpretations together without forcing them into uniformity.

The record’s brevity is part of its force. Ten tracks pass in roughly thirty-four minutes. Goat does not extend each rhythm until transcendence becomes mandatory. Songs erupt, establish their law and move aside. The short interludes prevent the major pieces from becoming interchangeable, while the final drift arrives before the album’s energy can decay into routine. Death gives the record urgency even at the level of sequencing. Nothing is granted infinite time.

That urgency connects with the album’s deepest generosity. “Soon You Die” could support nihilism, but everything that follows argues against wasting the interval. Dance. Blow the horns. Remind yourself. Give blessings. Watch the clouds pass. Mortality does not make action meaningless; it gives every action a cost that cannot be refunded.

This does not mean every death is chosen or that suffering becomes beautiful merely because survivors discover meaning afterward. Goat’s carnival cannot erase the cruelty of lives ended prematurely, anonymously or through the decisions of others. What the album can do is refuse the additional erasure of treating those lives as though nothing valuable was lost. Its volume and color insist upon the density contained inside living bodies.

The title therefore becomes less an address to death than a challenge. Death is present, acknowledged and even welcomed into the ceremony, but it will not be permitted to define life as negligible. The dancers know the floor will empty. The musicians know the final vibration will decay. The tooth above the temple knows what remains after flesh. Still, the rhythm multiplies.

Oh Death returns Goat from a six-year silence by presenting disappearance as another entrance. Requiem was not the endpoint. The masks had not become empty relics. The ancestral story, whether historical fact, private mythology or collaborative theatre, remained capable of generating new motion. The band does not come back by explaining where it went. It comes back by making the explanation physically unnecessary.

The cover’s ceremony has no visible officiant. No one stands outside the chaos to tell us what death means. Bodies, animals, instruments and symbols have already become one system, each feeding the next. That may be the record’s final wisdom. Life is so meaningful because it is not self-contained. Its loss is immense because every life has already entered other lives.

Death takes the body, but it cannot retrieve every rhythm the body gave away.

Blod - 2023 - Ondskans Fro

 

Self-released – none

Pilgrimssånger began inside a plain parish room. Där Ska Barnet Vara asked where the child should be placed within that room and what happens when love, belief, protection and authority become difficult to separate. Ondskans Frö opens after the building, congregation and perhaps the entire human arrangement have begun disappearing. The cover shows a devastated landscape of exposed roots, broken trunks and dark earth, with a few surviving trees standing against distant green mountains. Nothing spectacular is occurring. There are no flames, falling meteors or crowds running from a city. The catastrophe has already entered the soil.

That quietness is what makes the image disturbing. It resembles a place damaged by fire, industrial clearing, disease or some unnamed combination of human and natural violence. The distant mountains remain beautiful, and the sky has not turned theatrical. The earth can therefore be mistaken for recoverable scenery until the eye notices how little shelter remains. A forest has not simply died. Its roots have been pulled into view, the hidden structures by which life held itself in place now exposed like nerves.

Ondskans Frö means “The Seed of Evil,” and Gustaf Dicksson imagines that seed less as a demonic object than as an infection moving through relationships. The trees are contaminated. They infect the water, animals, air and children. Trust begins breaking apart. Dead fish rise to the surface. The sky slowly fades. Evil is not confined to an individual villain who can be defeated before the final scene. It has entered the systems through which living things sustain one another.

This makes the album’s ecological apocalypse inseparable from its spiritual one. A poisoned tree does not suffer alone. Its roots meet soil and water, its leaves meet air, its fruit enters animals, and its shade once protected bodies below it. Once corruption enters a connected system, every relationship becomes a possible route of transmission. The seed is terrifying because it is small enough to be overlooked while containing an entire future inside it.

Unlike the communal voices heard throughout the two preceding Blod albums, Ondskans Frö is entirely Gustaf Dicksson. The congregation has vanished. There are no additional singers to enlarge his fragile voice, no fellow travellers entering at the edge of the song, and no shared parish performance through which personal doubt can temporarily dissolve. The solitary quality is not merely a recording decision. It becomes part of the story. The last person on earth would have nobody left to harmonize with.

The musical language retains traces of the earlier Christian folk melodies, but they now move through synthesizer haze, mournful organ and guitar figures, and broad ambient spaces recalling the devotional kosmische music of Popol Vuh as well as the more distant electronic horizons associated with Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. Dicksson does not use these sounds to illustrate futuristic technology. They create an ancient future, a world after modern systems have failed where the remaining person hears old hymnal shapes drifting through the machinery’s final electrical glow.

The album unfolds across one day. It begins in the morning and moves through light, darkening, night and the dawn that never arrives. That structure gives each of its ten short pieces a position within an invisible film. The listener does not receive characters, dialogue or explicit scenes, but the titles provide enough landmarks to imagine a person walking through the final twenty-four hours, repeatedly interpreting changes in the sky before realizing that time itself is approaching its last border.

“Splittringen,” “The Fragmentation,” begins not with the appearance of evil but with the breaking of unity. Something previously understood as one body has divided. This could be society, family, congregation, nature, consciousness or all of them simultaneously. Fragmentation is often how catastrophe first becomes perceptible. The world remains physically present, but its parts no longer cooperate. Information contradicts itself, trusted people withdraw, institutions protect their own survival and individuals begin discovering that the map they shared no longer describes the ground beneath them.

Placed immediately after Blod’s two parish-inspired records, the title also recalls division within a religious community. Congregations promise a body made from many members, but they can fracture through doctrine, authority, fear, money, private injury and incompatible understandings of love. A spiritual community may survive for years while its internal bonds have already begun dying. In Ondskans Frö, that social fracture appears to widen until even the distinction between human damage and environmental collapse can no longer be maintained.

“Solen Lyser Upp Min Väg,” “The Sun Lights Up My Way,” follows with the album’s briefest moment of morning radiance. The title sounds hopeful enough to belong on Pilgrimssånger. Light traditionally means guidance, divine presence and the ability to distinguish the correct path. Yet the listener already knows this is the world’s final morning. The sun is not promising another day. It illuminates the road precisely enough for the traveller to see what has been lost.

This creates one of the album’s central reversals. Light does not necessarily save. It reveals. The person can finally see the poisoned water, damaged trees and distance separating them from everybody they trusted. The sun remains physically beautiful while shining upon something unbearable. Nature has not agreed to alter its colors merely because human meaning is ending.

The title track introduces the seed itself. A seed normally contains hope, inheritance and continuation. People plant because they expect a future they may not personally live to see. Calling evil a seed gives destruction the same patience. It can be planted quietly in one generation, nourished through habit and denial, then emerge fully inside the lives of people who never chose it.

The phrase also prevents evil from remaining supernatural and safely external. Seeds require conditions. Something prepares the soil, supplies water and allows the growth to continue. The album’s evil may be spiritual, ecological, political or psychological, but it is not magic dropped into an innocent world. Human beings participate in the systems that enlarge it. Even refusal to look can become a form of cultivation.

“Ett Tionde För Varje Barn,” literally “A Tenth for Every Child,” introduces the language of measurement and religious obligation. A tenth is a tithe, the portion traditionally given to the church, God or community. Connected with children, the phrase becomes unsettling. Is every child owed a share, or must every child surrender one? Are we offering part of what we possess to secure their future, or passing a debt into lives that did not create it?

The title can be heard ecologically as well. Each generation inherits some portion of the consequences produced by the one before it. Children receive the atmosphere, water, institutions, beliefs and emotional habits adults leave available. They may inherit wealth, but they also inherit contamination. The seed of evil becomes intergenerational not because children are evil, but because they are born inside conditions already planted.

This song sits near the middle of the daylight portion, where moral accounting is still possible. There may still be time to ask what is owed and to whom. Yet Ondskans Frö offers no evidence that the debt can now be paid. The final day has arrived because too many previous days treated the future as somebody else’s responsibility.

“Innan Det Blir Mörkt,” “Before It Gets Dark,” marks the approach of evening. The title contains an ordinary urgency familiar from childhood and domestic life: return home before darkness, complete the work while light remains, find the missing person, gather what must be protected. Darkness is not yet present, but every action is reorganized by its approach.

The phrase becomes especially heavy within an album where morning will not return. Usually, “before it gets dark” assumes another daylight is waiting on the opposite side. Night is temporary, even when frightening. Here the person must decide what to do before the final visibility disappears. There is no practical reason to save supplies for tomorrow, repair a structure for next year or make plans beyond the remaining hours. Value must be separated from continuation.

That question makes “Jag Är Redo Att Komma Hem,” “I Am Ready to Come Home,” the emotional center of the record. Home might mean an actual house, childhood, family, the parish community of the earlier albums, death or return to God. Readiness does not clarify the destination. It only tells us that resistance has changed into surrender.

Within Christian language, coming home frequently means dying and entering the divine presence. The phrase can offer comfort, but it also carries the weariness of someone who no longer expects earthly conditions to improve. Dicksson’s solitary performance allows readiness to remain ambiguous. Is the speaker peaceful, defeated, faithful or simply too exhausted to continue? The music does not force those states apart.

The idea of home becomes stranger when the earth itself is ending. Every physical home depends upon a larger home: breathable air, drinkable water, living soil, predictable seasons and relationships through which safety becomes meaningful. Once that larger structure collapses, a house is only material arranged against weather. The speaker may be ready to come home because every smaller version of home has failed.

“Stjärnor Lyser Upp Min Väg,” “Stars Light Up My Way,” mirrors the earlier sunlight title. Day has ended, but guidance continues from much farther away. The sun that illuminated the road belonged to the speaker’s immediate world. The stars reveal light already travelling across distances so enormous that some of its sources may no longer exist.

That delay makes starlight an extraordinary image for the album. The traveller sees evidence of worlds as they once were, not necessarily as they are now. Human memory operates similarly. Parents, churches, friendships and landscapes continue emitting emotional light after the conditions that produced it have disappeared. A person can navigate by something that is already gone.

The stars also reduce the apocalypse to local scale. Earth may be ending, but the larger universe does not stop to acknowledge it. Constellations remain visible, light continues crossing space, and whatever events unfold elsewhere remain beyond human knowledge. This is terrifying if humanity expected cosmic centrality, but it can also be strangely consoling. Existence is larger than the catastrophe.

“Sista Natten,” “The Last Night,” removes the uncertainty. There will be no morning in the ordinary sense. The final night differs from every earlier night because sleep can no longer function as a bridge toward another day. Nobody needs to set an alarm, prepare breakfast or leave a note for later. All unfinished activity becomes permanently unfinished.

The title’s simplicity protects it from melodrama. Dicksson does not need to name the destruction again. By this point, “last night” contains the entire poisoned landscape. The music can remain gentle because finality supplies more weight than volume could produce. This is not heavy music in the conventional sense, but everything heard now rests upon the disappearance of everything capable of hearing it.

“Dans För Döda,” “Dance for the Dead,” refuses to make the final human gesture passive. The dance may be performed for those who have already died, among them, or by the dead themselves. It could be ceremonial remembrance, bodily panic or the last remaining action whose purpose does not depend upon tomorrow.

Dance matters because it turns mortality back into movement. A dead body cannot dance, but the living body can carry rhythms received from people no longer present. The gesture becomes both celebration and evidence. The dancer shows that another person’s life entered them deeply enough to continue moving through muscle, timing and memory.

This is where Ondskans Frö briefly touches the same truth Goat approached on Oh Death, though by almost opposite musical means. Goat answers mortality with communal percussion, masks and bright physical excess. Blod stands alone in a ruined landscape and makes a much smaller movement. Both understand that death does not make life meaningless. It reveals why every living motion had value.

The album ends with “Ingen Gryning,” “No Dawn.” The final darkness is not followed by renewal, resurrection or a new generation emerging after the damage. The twenty-four-hour structure has completed itself, but the cycle does not begin again. Time reaches the place where repetition should occur and finds nothing available to repeat it.

The phrase “ingen gryning” also has a biblical shadow. In Swedish versions of Isaiah, those who have abandoned divine instruction and wandered hungry through darkness are described as having no dawn. Whether Dicksson intended that precise echo or not, it belongs naturally beside the religious language carried forward from the previous Blod records. Dawn is not merely morning light. It is revelation, mercy and the possibility that history still has somewhere to go.

Denying the album a dawn is therefore more severe than ending with death. Death can still belong to a religious cycle of resurrection, reunion and eternal life. No dawn suggests the disappearance of the framework within which those promises were understood. The church room, child, pilgrim and last witness have all been removed. Even the person waiting for God may no longer be present when light would normally return.

Yet the record itself survives the ending it describes. This is the productive contradiction inside all imagined apocalypse art. Somebody composed the last day, recorded it, pressed it onto vinyl and sent it into a future assumed to contain listeners. The physical object contradicts its narrative by believing in continuation. Dicksson says everything is gone, then manufactures five hundred messages for people who remain.

The reused sleeves deepen that contradiction. Each new cover is pasted onto an old record jacket, meaning the apocalypse is physically carried by an object that has already survived one identity. Beneath the devastated landscape lies another album, another design and another history concealed but not erased. The end of one world becomes the material supporting a second.

This has been central to several Blod releases. Reusing jackets is economical and consistent with the anti-commercial DIY culture surrounding Discreet Music, but it also performs the music’s philosophy. No object begins from purity. Every new statement is made upon inherited material. Damage, belief, art and responsibility arrive from somewhere before us.

The anonymous photograph functions the same way. We are not told exactly where the landscape is or what destroyed it. That missing context allows it to become several places at once: forest after fire, battlefield after vegetation returns, land stripped for industry, or a future remembered through the faded color of an old print. The image looks both documentary and prophetic.

Its border is almost polite. The photograph sits inside white space like a scenic postcard, while the blunt hand-cut title beneath it identifies the horror. This creates the feeling that somebody visited the end of the world, took a picture and mailed it home. The message arrived, but perhaps too late to alter the destination.

Ondskans Frö differs from Pilgrimssånger and Där Ska Barnet Vara not by abandoning their religious concerns, but by testing what remains after the social structure of faith disappears. The earlier albums contained churches, children, hymns, guest voices and inherited ritual. This one asks whether faith can still function when there is nobody left to affirm it.

The answer is not delivered doctrinally. The solitary figure continues locating paths through sunlight, stars and the idea of home. Those are old spiritual coordinates. Even after evil has entered nature and society, the speaker still interprets light as guidance. Belief may have lost its community, but its language remains embedded in perception.

That persistence can be comforting or frightening. Faith may survive because it is true, or because it entered so early that the mind cannot imagine reality without it. The child from Där Ska Barnet Vara has grown into the final witness, still naming the sky through the vocabulary inherited inside the parish room. The album never confirms whether anyone is listening.

This uncertainty allows beauty to remain honest. Dicksson has said that although the record concerns the end of the earth, he likes it and considers it beautiful. That is not necessarily a contradiction. Beauty is what makes destruction terrible. A dead world matters because it once contained light, trees, children, songs, trust and places people called home.

The music does not beautify catastrophe in order to excuse it. It gathers evidence of what is being lost. A mournful organ phrase, fragile guitar melody or drifting synthesizer tone becomes valuable because somebody was alive to make it and another person may still be alive to hear it. The album’s softness prevents the apocalypse from becoming entertainment.

Loud catastrophe can provide emotional distance. Explosions become spectacle, and the listener enjoys destruction from a protected seat. Ondskans Frö offers very little protection. It makes the ending quiet enough that the listener must inhabit the remaining hours rather than watch them from outside. There is no hero, enemy army or technological solution. There is only attention.

That may be the larger meaning of the seed. Evil does not win only when everything has been destroyed. It wins whenever relationships are treated as disposable, whenever the future is denied because it cannot speak for itself, and whenever a person decides that what happens outside immediate awareness carries no moral weight. The final day is grown from countless earlier moments in which attention could have been given and was withheld.

Still, the record gives attention. It notices the road beneath sunlight, the stars above darkness, the invitation to come home and the possibility of dancing for those already gone. It preserves the final day carefully enough that the imagined world does not disappear without testimony.

The last track says there is no dawn, but the listener eventually lifts the stylus, closes the file or returns to the room where actual daylight may still be present. That return is the album’s unspoken gift. The apocalypse has been rehearsed while time remains. The poisoned seed has been shown before every tree is infected.

The cover’s damaged roots are therefore not only an image of death. Roots exposed to view reveal how thoroughly life depended upon invisible connection. Water, soil, fungi, weather and neighboring plants participated in what appeared above ground as one tree. Humanity is no different. A person looks individual because most of the relationships sustaining them remain hidden.

Ondskans Frö imagines the moment those relationships fail. Its sorrow comes from understanding that they existed. Its beauty comes from listening closely enough to hear them before they are gone.

The Janitors - 2020 - Noisolation Sessions Vol.1

 

Cardinal Fuzz – CFLCR024

The cover shows a building losing confidence in its own dimensions. A doorway, wall or narrow interior passage has been submerged in cold blue, while a bright vertical strip of white and red appears to split the room open. The band name and title have been scratched across the image in thin angular letters, doubled by red and cyan shadows that resemble a damaged 3-D photograph viewed without the glasses. Nothing here looks abandoned exactly, but everything appears unoccupied. The building remains while the social purpose that once filled it has temporarily vanished.
That image is especially appropriate for a band whose name came from actual work. Jonas and Henric met while employed as janitors at a Stockholm museum, discovered a shared love of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, and started making the harsh noise and feedback that their other groups were not providing. Sixteen years later, a global emergency emptied museums, clubs, offices and public rooms across the world. The Janitors returned to a private building of their own, Helter Shelter Studio, and made an album inside the absence.
Noisolation is a clever word because it refuses to decide whether the “no” cancels isolation or intensifies it. The musicians were isolated from the tour network, the northern studio they had booked, their ordinary plans and the larger social world, but they were not isolated from one another or from the need to create. The title does not deny the reality of separation. It identifies sound as the small passage they managed to keep open through it.
The album had not been planned. In March 2020 The Janitors already possessed a different set of finished songs and intended to record them at Omnivox Studios in northern Sweden. When that became impossible, they initially went into their own studio to keep working on the material until ordinary time returned. Ordinary time did not return. Instead, they recorded Joy Division’s “Isolation,” the most obvious possible cover for that moment and therefore also the most dangerous. A lesser version could have become a quarantine novelty, meaningful for two weeks and embarrassing forever afterward.
Their version did something more productive. It slowed the song, removed much of its familiar synthetic propulsion and placed it inside the group’s own low-pressure system of fuzz, drone and psychic exhaustion. The response convinced them that the interrupted circumstances had produced a method worth following. Rather than continuing to polish the postponed album, they would begin with one idea each week, record it in one night, mix it during the following week and then declare it finished.
Those rules turned the absence of normal planning into a compositional tool. The band could not spend months deciding what a song ought to become after the world reopened, because nobody knew when that reopening would happen or what kind of world would be waiting. Each performance had to remain attached to the emotional weather of the week that produced it. A questionable note, unbalanced passage or lyric born from immediate anxiety would not be repaired out of existence. The songs became dated entries rather than predictions.
This makes Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 closer to an audio diary than a conventional studio album, though nothing about its sound is small or privately whispered. The six pieces run for more than forty-four minutes and arrive through enormous repetitions, scorched guitars, ritualistic percussion and voices that often seem to be calling from another part of the building. The diary has been written on the walls with amplifiers.
“Through the Storm Into Chaos” begins by reversing the usual promise of survival. We are accustomed to travelling through chaos toward peace, through darkness toward light, through the storm until clear weather appears. The Janitors move through the storm into chaos. The destination is not recovery but a condition even less legible than the one already surrounding them.
That title captures the first months of 2020 with uncomfortable precision. Every day seemed to pass through one emergency only to reveal a wider network of uncertainty beneath it. Medical danger became social isolation; isolation exposed economic inequality; public confusion opened new routes for political manipulation; private worry expanded until it became difficult to separate personal fear from the larger systems producing it. The song’s heavy cyclical motion does not provide a dramatic account of those events. It creates the feeling of being trapped inside their continuation.
Repetition is essential to The Janitors because their drones are rarely static. A riff returns until the listener stops hearing it as a sequence of notes and begins experiencing it as architecture. Guitar becomes wall, bass becomes floor, percussion becomes the movement of machinery somewhere beyond sight. The opening piece does not rush toward a revelation. It changes the pressure inside the room until the listener’s ordinary sense of proportion begins slipping.
This is the band’s version of psychedelia. It is not primarily decorative color, pastoral wonder or a collection of approved vintage effects. It is the destabilization of scale. A small figure becomes enormous through repetition. A background sound moves forward without noticeably increasing in volume. Something that first seemed heavy eventually becomes strangely calming because the body has adapted to living beneath it.
“High on God” enters through ritual chant and mesmeric percussion before dissolving into harsher frequencies. The title compresses religion and intoxication into the same phrase, continuing the band’s long suspicion of belief when it becomes authority, narcotic certainty or a mechanism through which one group claims moral permission to dominate another. Yet the music does not stand safely outside ritual. The Janitors understand its attraction too well.
A repeated drum pattern, collective voice and overwhelming volume can produce surrender without theology. The body begins obeying before the intellect decides what the gathering means. Rock music, religious worship and political spectacle all understand this process. Repetition turns individual uncertainty into shared force. “High on God” places the listener inside that force while allowing the surrounding noise to reveal its danger.
The title can therefore be heard as mockery, accusation and honest description. Spiritual ecstasy may be real to the person experiencing it even when institutions exploit the experience. The song does not attempt to settle whether transcendence comes from God, chemicals, rhythm, amplified frequencies or people temporarily becoming one organism. It concentrates on the unstable condition in which those possibilities become difficult to separate.
The Janitors’ politics are not added to the music as explanatory liner notes. They are embedded in its pressure. Earlier releases confronted the rise of the far right, religion used as control and the damage of neoliberal systems. During the Noisolation period, those public concerns became increasingly entangled with personal fear, family, mental strain and the welfare of people around them. The political and private could no longer be assigned separate tracks.
“Indifferent State” occupies ten minutes near the album’s center and turns emotional numbness into both a psychological condition and a form of government. An indifferent state may be the mind protecting itself by reducing what it can feel. It may also be the state as political institution, observing suffering while translating human lives into acceptable losses, economic figures and administrative language.
The piece loosens the album’s heavy rock structure through acoustic or folk-like color, unusual percussion and a darker devotional atmosphere. Instead of crushing the listener through immediate volume, it creates an uncertain landscape where each sound seems separated by a little more distance than comfort allows. The music feels suspended between campfire, empty sanctuary and something transmitted from a landscape beyond the city.
That ambiguity gives “Indifferent State” unusual power. Folk music is often associated with roots, place and continuity, but the song sounds uprooted. Familiar human materials remain, strings, hand-played rhythm, voice, but the community that would ordinarily give them social context appears missing. It resembles folk music after the village has been evacuated.
Indifference is not the same as peace. Peace implies that conflict has been addressed or temporarily resolved. Indifference can be the nervous system shutting doors because too much information has entered at once. During an extended crisis, the inability to react to each new disaster can look morally cold from outside while functioning as emergency survival within the person experiencing it.
The Janitors do not condemn that condition from a distance. They remain inside it for ten minutes, letting repetition reveal the difference between calm and depletion. Small instrumental changes acquire enormous significance because the emotional surface initially appears so level. The song becomes a study of what continues moving after the conscious mind has declared that it cannot process anything else.
“Thing Is Rising” returns to physical dread. The title’s refusal to identify the thing makes it more effective. A named threat can be studied, argued with or contained by language. A thing is whatever has not yet entered a useful category. It can rise from underground, from the body, from society, from accumulated fear or from the amplified signal itself.
The song builds steadily rather than arriving as an immediate explosion. Weight gathers by increments. A riff that initially appears manageable begins occupying more of the available air, while the rhythm keeps advancing with the patience of machinery that has no need to hurry. The rising thing does not chase anyone. It knows the room has limited exits.
In the context of 2020, possible identities multiply. The thing could be infection, authoritarian politics, conspiracy, unemployment, domestic pressure or the private mental collapse produced when every source of reassurance has become unreliable. The music wisely refuses to choose. The most honest representation of dread may be the stage before fear has decided which object deserves its full attention.
The cover’s doorway becomes relevant here. A doorway normally offers passage between states, but this one appears blocked by light, chromatic doubling and photographic distortion. We cannot determine whether the glowing vertical strip marks an entrance, an exit or a fault opening inside the image. “Thing Is Rising” creates the same uncertainty in sound. The threshold is visible, but crossing it may lead deeper into the pressure rather than away from it.
“The Mind Is a Terrible Thing” accelerates the album’s pulse without releasing its tension. The phrase is incomplete in cultural memory, where it usually continues into a statement about waste. Removing that conclusion leaves the mind itself defined as terrible: a magnificent instrument capable of memory, imagination and connection, but also a machine that can manufacture fear long after the immediate danger has left the room.
Isolation intensifies that machinery. Without ordinary contact, repeated routes and the incidental corrections supplied by other people, thought can begin feeding upon itself. A possibility becomes a prediction, the prediction becomes evidence and the evidence becomes another reason to withdraw. The Janitors answer that private loop with a collective one. Their repetition is external, loud and negotiated among several bodies.
The track’s faster movement recalls the pulse-driven lineage running from Spacemen 3 and The Heads through the band’s own history, but it does not feel like an exercise in psychedelic tradition. Speed becomes a symptom. The song keeps finding more detail inside the same forward motion, as though attention has become unable to stop scanning the environment.
This is one of the album’s larger paradoxes. The strict recording method prevented obsessive revision, yet the music itself often resembles obsession. Figures repeat, tones accumulate and the voice returns to an idea until it becomes difficult to remember what existed before it. The band protected the songs from studio perfectionism while allowing the performances to document the repetitive patterns of thought surrounding their creation.
The closing “Isolation” returns to the track that began the entire project. Chronologically it is the seed; structurally it becomes the destination. The album therefore ends at its own origin. Five later compositions gradually lead the listener back to the moment when The Janitors first recognized that the interruption could become material.
Joy Division’s original recording was already built around contradiction. Its rhythm moves with nervous energy while the title names separation. The Janitors remove much of that restless surface and expose a heavier interior. Slowed down, the song no longer sounds like someone attempting to outrun confinement. It sounds like the room itself has become aware of the person trapped inside it.
A successful cover does not simply reproduce a familiar song through another band’s equipment. It discovers an unrealized possibility within the composition. The Janitors find doom, drone and exhausted ceremony inside “Isolation.” The melody remains recognizable, but the surrounding emotional scale changes. What once moved through post-punk machinery is dragged into the long Swedish winter-night atmosphere the group uses to describe its own sound.
Placing the cover last also prevents it from functioning as a topical gimmick. By the time it arrives, the preceding tracks have constructed an entire language around isolation. Storm, religious intoxication, indifference, rising dread and the terrible activity of the mind have all become forms of separation. The borrowed song no longer needs the pandemic context to justify its inclusion. The album has made isolation its internal geography.
The original sleeve captures this with extraordinary economy. The image appears to show part of a studio, corridor or institutional room, but the red and cyan displacement makes the building look neurologically unstable. It resembles the kind of color separation once used to create depth, except no corrective lenses are supplied. The two images remain slightly apart, making the room feel as though reality has failed to align with itself.
That visual misregistration resembles life during the pandemic’s early phase. Familiar surroundings remained physically present, but their meaning had shifted. A doorway was still a doorway, yet crossing it carried new calculations. A workplace remained in place while work disappeared or became dangerous. A friend remained nearby geographically while becoming unreachable socially. Everything was recognizable and displaced at once.
The hand-drawn lettering refuses the clean graphic finish expected from a carefully prepared album campaign. It looks added urgently, perhaps directly onto the image or copied from an improvised sign. This fits recordings created under rules designed to stop revision. The cover is not advertising a polished account of crisis after everyone has agreed what the crisis meant. It is a label attached while the contents are still unstable.
There is another accidental resonance in seeing an empty institutional interior beneath the name The Janitors. Custodial workers understand buildings differently from the people who visit them for their official purpose. They encounter rooms before opening and after closing, when display, commerce and public identity have been temporarily removed. They know where the machinery is, which doors resist, what leaks and how much labor is required to make an apparently self-sustaining institution function.
The pandemic briefly forced much of society to see its structures from that angle. Buildings stood empty while the hidden systems sustaining ordinary life became visible: cleaners, delivery workers, health workers, food workers, transit workers and everyone whose labor could not be converted into a video call. The Janitors do not make an explicit occupational concept album, but their name and cover inevitably place this music near those emptied rooms and the people who continued entering them.
The album’s creation also rejects the fantasy that art emerges best through unlimited time and resources. Their cancelled studio booking initially looked like a pure loss. Instead, the smaller space and severe method produced material the band regarded as some of its strongest. Constraint did not magically improve everything, nor does crisis deserve gratitude for the suffering it causes. But people can create new forms inside damaged circumstances without pretending the damage was necessary.
The occasional wrong note is important for this reason. In a conventional album cycle, wrongness is identified retrospectively and corrected according to the imagined needs of a permanent object. Noisolation Sessions treats wrongness as evidence of presence. A person made a choice during one night in a disturbing week. Removing every uncertainty might have improved the technical surface while erasing the date stamped inside the performance.
This is close to the documentary value of a home recording, scene rip or amateur transfer. The imperfections disclose the route. They tell us that sound passed through a particular room, machine, level setting and human decision rather than descending into the archive from nowhere. The Janitors’ one-night rule protects the route from being polished away.
The transparent blue vinyl extends the cover’s frozen atmosphere into the physical disc. Blue can suggest distance, cold, police light, digital screens or the artificial tint of a room photographed after ordinary warmth has been removed. As the record turns, the color becomes motion. The object transforms the static blue enclosure into something capable of carrying sound outward.
Cardinal Fuzz and Little Cloud Records released the album across Europe and the United States, allowing six recordings produced under severe local limitation to enter an international network. This is another reason “Noisolation” works as a title. The band could not travel, but the artifact could. Musicians were restricted to their immediate environment while records, files, messages and packages continued constructing relationships beyond it.
The phrase “To create is to resist” appeared at the center of the band’s explanation. It can become an empty slogan if creation is treated automatically as morally valuable, but The Janitors use it more specifically. Their resistance lies in refusing the paralysis, isolation and narrowing of possibility produced by the moment. They make sound together, leave its irregularities intact and send it outward toward people undergoing related pressures elsewhere.
The music does not offer escape into a brightly colored alternative universe. Its resistance consists of giving dread a physical form large enough to share. Private anxiety becomes collective drone. A thought trapped inside one person becomes a riff several people must negotiate in real time. Noise stops being evidence that communication has failed and becomes the medium through which communication occurs.
Calling the release Vol.1 was initially more wager than plan. The band did not know whether the conditions would last long enough to require another volume, or whether this method would continue producing useful material. The numeral contains uncertainty about both the pandemic and the project. Two years later, a second Noisolation collection appeared, darker and made under less restrictive creative rules. The temporary response had become its own branch of the discography.
The album that was postponed in March 2020 did not simply vanish either. Songs were shelved, additional material accumulated during the Noisolation period, and portions of that expanding archive eventually contributed to An Error Has Occurred in 2024. The interruption changed the route but did not destroy the destination. One intended record divided into several possible futures.
That history makes Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 more than a pandemic artifact. It is the hinge on which The Janitors’ method turned. Before it, songs commonly began as riffs or ideas developed through longer preparation. Here the group learned what happened when it stopped protecting material from immediacy. They reached what they later described as a kind of endpoint with noise and drone, allowing the following album to recover clearer melodies, vocal harmonies and another relationship with restraint.
The record documents a band discovering that its most recognizable language could still surprise its speakers. After sixteen years, a group may become fluent enough to reproduce itself efficiently. The one-night rule removed some of that fluency’s safety. There was no time to convert every spontaneous gesture into an approved Janitors gesture. The band had to listen before habit supplied the answer.
That is why these tracks feel connected despite their different structures. They share a state of attention rather than a predetermined concept. “Through the Storm Into Chaos” enters sustained pressure, “High on God” turns ritual into overload, “Indifferent State” explores numb suspension, “Thing Is Rising” builds unnamed dread, “The Mind Is a Terrible Thing” accelerates mental repetition and “Isolation” returns everything to the moment of separation from which the experiment emerged.
Together they form a psychological sequence for a crisis nobody yet understood. Confusion becomes intoxication, intoxication becomes numbness, numbness senses something rising, the mind begins racing and the person finally recognizes the room as isolation. The album does not conclude with recovery because recovery had not occurred. It preserves the unfinished condition honestly.
The doorway on the cover therefore never needs to open. Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 is not about escaping the room. It is about discovering that a room can still transmit. Cables, microphones, amplifiers and human attention turn enclosure into an instrument. The band cannot restore the interrupted world, but it can strike the walls hard enough for someone outside to hear that people remain within them.