New Release of the Week: Goat - Goat

The Ouroborus - that is, the icon of the snake or dragon eating its own tail - appears to some a statement of the brutality of nature. To others of a Gnostic disposition it symbolises the duality of the divine and earthly in mankind.

But most commonly, it’s taken simply to mean the endless cycles of death and rebirth that characterise life on this planet.

As such, it’s an image that looms large in the world of Goat, the ever-mysterious and endlessly revivifying collective whose latest album marks another adventure above and beyond this particular plane of reality.

‘One More Death’ and ‘Goatbrain’ are spectacular curtain-raisers, embodying a hedonistic spirit driven by incisive funk and possessed by merciless fuzz/wah-drenched guitar. Yet elsewhere, the band’s love of hip hop is the fuel for the epic album closer, ‘Ourobourus’, which marries infectious chants to breathless Lalo Schifrin-style breakbeat action.

Sound Pick: Morphine - Cure for Pain

‘Cure for Pain’ is the second album by Morphine, originally released in 1993, and now re-released for ‘Rocktober’.

Morphine was an American alternative rock group formed by Mark Sandman, Dana Colley and Jerome Deupree in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1989.

The band combined blues and jazz elements with more traditional rock arrangements, giving it an unusual sound; this was embodied in the line-up, with Sandman using a two-string bass and Colley a baritone saxophone.

The lack of a guitarist really made them stand out at a time when the instrument was very much to the fore in alternative music.

Morphine enjoyed positive critical appraisal, while in the United States the band was embraced and promoted by the indie rock community, including public and college radio stations and MTV’s 120 Minutes.