It seems we as a society have grown accustomed to sticking labels on things. Everyone who’s visited the UK in the last five or so years might have noticed a new fondness of naming storms. When I grew up, this used to be a distinguishing feature of weather that would cause severe damage. Hurricanes, tornadoes, the sort of thing that might rip the roof off your house.
These days, however, it’s a little different. Now, any weather that might involve a few trashcans falling over and your auntie’s headscarf flying about in the wind is given a suitably threatening human name. So far, in the last few weeks, we’ve had Storm Bella and Storm Christoph. Forever to go down in history as wind and rain that occurred in the UK. My trashcans stayed upright. Thank God. Some people were not so lucky.
Three years ago, in the winter of 2018, one journalist named a cold wave that came from Siberia “the beast from the east”. The name appeared everywhere from news broadcasts to paper headlines. It was a fun play on words, and gave an identity to the dreaded few inches of snow that plagued our roads and sidewalks (causing mass elation among schoolkids the nation over). For some, however, this tag was more than just a tag. This wasn’t a Bella. Or a Christoph. Or a Simon. This label had an unnerving subtext wrapped underneath its simplicity.
That was the opinion of Lottie Pendlebury, anyway, who spent the majority of Britain’s cold wave cooped away inside a South London studio. She was preparing for the release of Goat Girls’ debut album, spending the time making new music with band-members Ellie, Naima and Rosy. They understood the subtext because they knew the culture.
Just two years before “the beast from the east”, Britain had made the ground-breaking decision to leave the EU, causing a widespread reaction of disbelief and disappointment. At least until Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. This diverted attention from Britain’s doorstep and onto America’s, but both upsets were rooted in the same foundations. Trump’s campaign, like the campaign of Brexit, was based entirely upon placing blame onto other people’s shoulders. There were storms ongoing in both countries. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, education. Xenophobia was the easy answer to all of them. The easiness to hold the nose and point the finger became a winning playing card in the game of right wing politics. Unnoticed by most, but pinpointed by Lottie, the beast from the east was another attempt to blame climate change on our eastern European neighbors. Apparently this storm, like all other political storms, came from a place other than our own.
Just as well Goat Girl were cooped up in the studio. In a world where right wing media is intent on playing up systemic bigotry, sometimes it’s down to the little people to rip out the truth with guitars and drum machines. “You’re of those pests,” Lottie sings on the opening track of new album On All Fours. “The pest from the west, drums on his chest, sucks from the tee tee”. Here, Goat Girl divert the listeners attention from the east to the west. They make the argument that the industrialization and neo-liberalism formed inside our own backyards are a far bigger player in the problems we face. Whilst it may be easy to look elsewhere, looking inside of ourselves, recognizing our own evils, no matter how hard or unpleasant, will give us the answers we need to move forward.
This, in many ways, becomes the core of their sophomore record. In “Badibaba”, Lottie calls us as people an infection who “turn our mess into debris and shove it somewhere we won’t see”. In “The Crack”, she presents us with a world which is ripped apart and fractured, with protest songs echoing out from the cracks to deaf ears. This being a punk record, things naturally get weirder too. “Where Do We Go From Here?” sees the band muse about opening up the Tory Party leader Boris Johnson. “I’m sure it stinks under his skin, where pores secrete all the hate from within, we open up the muscle work, coated in all this thick sludge and dirt, hurt.” Unrelenting, but unafraid in provoking a reaction, Goat Girls’ lyrics become a protest on where we as a culture are headed. Just as they open up Boris Johnson, so too do they dissect the world that we live in.
What do we think? Why do we think it? What do we overlook because the media feeds us subtly discriminating nicknames?
True to the spirit of post punk, Goat Girl do this with an array of genre subverting bangers. The music strays from pure guitar driven tracks, to synth led outros, jazz infused basslines and orchestral detours. It’s a spewing of artistic guts. A dissection, of sorts, on the band’s own potential.
It’s certainly a testament to any band that we’re left wondering where they could possibly go from here. But so long as xenophobic media remains, or leaders like Boris Johnson pointing the finger, you would figure that Goat Girl will have something new up their sleeve. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next storm to find out.