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Generally, in defiance of the way the proverb works
for books, you can judge an album by its cover.
Airbrushed zombies on Harley Davidsons = heavy metal.
Minimalist futuristic neon lines and dots = genuine or
revival '80s electronics. Hippies in floppy hats over a
soft focus desert landscape = throwback '70s folk.
Golden Animals are the latter. Unreconstructed late
'60s/early '70s bluesy folk, stripped of all pretensions
towards folktronica, nu folk or the freakish edge
Devendra Banhart likes to sharpen, they might
as well have fallen through a timewarp from thirty odd
years ago. Or else they're Jack White's folkish
cousins, separated at birth and forced to make music
without raising their voices.
All of this is either superbly excellent or a
complete waste of time, depending on which side of the
unreconstructed folk-blues fence you sit on.
Baltimore-born Tommy Eisner and his Swedish
counterpart Linda Beecroft certainly aren't pushing
any envelopes but what they do, they do very, very
well.
Free Your Mind And Win A Pony is an old-fashioned
album in all senses of the word. Both the songs and
the instrumentation come out of a memory of the 1920s
that predates rock'n'roll so much that it's a miracle
any recordings of it exist at all. Their production is
similarly stripped down and bare, as raw and basic as
something you might find filling out a legends of the
blues compilation picked up for �2.99 in a remaindered
book shop.
In fact, should tracks such as Try On Me and I Want
You To Come find themselves sent back in time now,
disguised on a fragile old 78 and directed towards a
young Mick Jagger or John Lennon, they
could easily find themselves plundered without credit
or hawked around Hamburg clubs until their fingers
bled.
In other words, whether you want to take any notice
or not of back stories about mysterious fortune
tellers predicting the formation of the band,
recording sessions in the middle of the California
desert and lone freight trains trundling by in the
distance, Golden Animals do a remarkably impressive
job of conjuring up just the kind of image they set
out to do: floppy hatted, Afghan-coated drop outs
singin' blue-eyed Blues as the acid gradually seeps
out of their veins and into the foothills of the mesa.
Why they're doing this in 2008 is anyone's guess, but
on the other hand if the musical genre ain't broke,
there really ain't no point in fixing it.
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