Golden Animals : Free Your Mind and Win a Pony

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/goldenanimalsfreeyourmind.jpg" alt=" " />Old-school blues-rock is revived on Golden Animals’ debut, <em>Free Your Mind and Win a Pony</em>....
6.9 HappyParts
2008 

Golden Animals : Free Your Mind and Win a PonyOld-school blues-rock is revived on Golden Animals’ debut, Free Your Mind and Win a Pony.Baltimore’s Tommy Eisner and Sweden’s Linda Beecroft draw from the rootsy, earthy sounds of the seventies as Golden Animals, harkening back to those days when folk, country, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll all splashed around in the same mud pit.  While a little one-note, and declining somewhat, Free Your Mind and Win a Pony jams.

Like many a record, Free Your Mind is hampered by starting off with its best two tracks, “The Steady Roller” and “Queen Mary (The Flop)”.  An old-school blues-rock barroom procession, “Steady” starts off Free Your Mind ready, while “Queen Mary” plays like those classic upbeat Dead songs you know you still love.  Unfortunately, the following “Ride Easy” is a real slip, as the stomp gets plodding.  The tendency towards the stop/start rhythm is a problem that plagues Free Your Mind; further tracks, like “Alice” and their cover of the traditional “Turn You Around (Don’t Let Nobody)”, suffer the same fate.

Other times, though, drawing from the barstool rock works well, like with the gangly garage-blues “Try On Me” or the mug-anthem “My My My”, and the sloppiness works for the hillbilly “My Friend Bill” (though the following “I Want You To Come” is a bit of a grind).  But Free Your Mind also has a couple of pieces where the Golden Animals break out of their rock: the effective middle number “Follow Me Down” is quite carrying, while the outright odd “Darkness & Light” has kind of an ‘American Gothic’ haunt.

Not exactly wildly original, the Golden Animals do draw from a wide and deep pond, and unlike other seventies-inspired acts, they don’t lose the good times in guitar god wankery.  If anything, Free Your Mind and Win a Pony could have used a little more musical depth to go with the rock ‘n’ roll fun, but they’ve got the fundies down pat.

MP3 Stream: “Queen Mary (The Flop)”

{audio}/mp3/files/Golden Animals – Queen Mary The Flop.mp3{/audio}

Categories
Album Reviews
  • Anonymous
    at
  • No Comment

    Leave a Reply

    Album of the Week