REVIEW: Black Goat Of The Woods’ self-titled EP

It’s great when a band comes out with new music out of nowhere, or at least that’s the common phrase to use when someone makes music that blows you away, leading to the question “where did these guys come from?” In this case, Black Goat Of The Woods are from Indianapolis, Indiana and they play the kind of music that makes you want to deny everything good in the world, only to lead you to want to cut your eyes open with a razor blade. Some of it comes off like Venom if they were raised in the 90’s or 00’s, still bringing on that dark heaviness that made them famous in the 1980’s but playing with the kind of precision that lacks toe sloppiness Venom sometimes had in their heyday. With tracks like “Terrorize The Church”, “The Whoring Cunt”, and “Fisting Angels”, they will most likely not be welcome at your holiday get-togethers but outside of the shock tactics of the titles, Black Goat Of The Woods, don’t dwell too much on embellishments for most of the album, keeping things under the two minute mark (sometimes under the one minute mark). But when they do go for demonic anthems, as they do in “Crawling Through Hell”, they show what they’re all about by playing in a number of different speeds and structures, offering a glimpse of what they are capable of. There’s also a track here where the vocalist allows himself to get into David Lee Roth grunt mode, which for me tells me that while they are serious about creating brutality in metal form, they can add a bit of unintended/unexpected humor to throw listeners off. I hope the expected and unexpected will follow in future releases.

(Their EP is a CD-only release, which can be ordered by clicking here.)

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=3906510934/size=venti/bgcol=B34B30/linkcol=FFFB10/