Andrew Jackson Jihad/Flaspar/Golden Boots
Three-way split
Night Pass Records
By Jose Fritz
While this is a three way split, Golden Boots loaded a full 10 tracks onboard, so for their fans it feels like a full album. But for Flaspar and Andrew Jackson Jihad fans it did feel like a split, they have 4 and 6 cuts respectively.
There was the new Beatles and the old Beatles. But now there is only one living Beatle, but both the Traveling Wilburys and Wings were an affront to pop aficionados everywhere and the bifurcation of the Beatles catalog perplexed me for a long time.
I was not a pop fan per se, so the division was lost on me. But that was long ago when I still regularly listened to Scatterbrain cassettes. Today I understand that these are two massive parallel trunks that are so weighty that they split the pop tree in half. On one side is the traditional pop song, 4/4 time, driven by jangly guitar and stanza-chorus-stanza structure. On the other side is everything else imaginable: wild horn sections, studio experiments, dissonant forays, lo-fi experiments and certainly things I am not imagining right this second.
Golden Boots is from the latter trunk: they of the Brian Wilson Orchestral school of pop mutations and they of the Beatles symphonic drug experiment. If the Eels founded a school for homeless wayward songwriters, Golden Boots would teach there. They take the label alt/country willingly, but it’s meant in the same way that the Handsome Family means it. If country songs can be based around a toy whistle, be peppered with tuba and zither and make no references to dogs, trains, pickup trucks or the state of Texas, then sure it’s country music. The singer wears a cowboy hat sometimes too. Is that worth anything?
Country is not just a genre, it’s a place, a state of mind and is America’s poorly kept backyard. The fences are grown over, its surface pockmarked by rodent burrows and the grass uncut but tallest over the septic tank. It is only in a place like this that Golden Boots could grow to become the twisted incorrigible weed that it is. Their ringleader Dimitri Manos started off in the band Trashcan Hawaii. It consisted of him and some friends playing a leaf blower, a bongo and a bass guitar, and you’ll quickly realize that Manos hasn’t changed much.
In the studio he makes sure you can hear the plastic keys of the Casio click against the chassis while the slot covers thwap over the vent holes on the sax. Held notes never stay in key, strings buzz against frets and at times I think I can hear White Album-outtake samples of Ringo stoned and giggling in the background. They are committed to lo-fi in a charming way, not a Peaches way. Peaches sang into a stock Macintosh microphone showing she knew how to cause unpleasant distortion to cover up her band’s base inability to play their instruments. Golden Boots shows off multilayered complex arrangements at times, proving their prowess. They are lo-fi when they want to and because they want to.
Andrew Jackson Jihad has a similar lo-fi interest in their more recognizable brand of alt country, but their similarities end there. Their jihadist tunes are funny, simple and entertaining, but remind me of some of the more fun open mic nights on campuses and coffee shops. The music is powered by charisma, and that me-me-me artsy streak, something that will require repeated listens.
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