Golden Boots
Burning Brain
Park The Van
By Jose Fritz
It’s got to be jimson weed. When I hear records like this I debate what drugs the band is doing. Golden Boots manages to keep a nice lazy pace for the melodies; tweekers couldn’t manage the gentle pacing. That eliminates Dexedrine, crank, crack, coke, reds and the whole family of lesser uppers. I mean hypothetically they could be just drunks but the song writing is too good. Bob Pollard was a big time drunk and a writer of pop songs but eventually he became a full-time drunk and a writer of crap. Booze always catches up with you. If it’s not the jaundice it’s the shakes, if it’s not the shakes it's the liver failure, if not liver failure then ataxia. It’s always something: even a bridge abutment at 85 miles an hour is something.
The band was created in a crucible below the serried Catalina Mountains. Ryan Eggleston and Dimitri Manos were out in Tucson and had tired of the idea of art rock being based around motorized lawn care tools. Dimitri was working at a salvage yard and he had a drum set, a full set of New Lost City Ramblers records, and they had some strange ideas about the human digestive tract. They put out a few hand-made cassettes on Nightpass Recordings, an LP (Bland Canyon Adventure,) and a three-way split with Flaspar and Andrew Jackson Jihad.
You might know Dimitri as the drummer for Dr. Dog, Tom Walbank and the Ambassadors, Sugarbush, The Galactic Federation of Love or The Fashionistas. In truth I could say that Dimitri seems to play for every other band in the city of Tucson, Arizona. In those other bands he is a player, a hired hand and secondary character. In Golden Boots he is the locus principum, this one alone is his band. But you can hear his effect wherever he’s been. In an interview a couple years ago, Dimitri said “The Meat Puppets altered my understanding of music by introducing me to an immediacy and chaos that I had not experienced.” In context, it seemed like a throwaway question, but that answer certainly was not disposable. It’s a little sugar packet of truth.
Golden Boots has grown accustomed to calling themselves crumbly and western, but this record less resembles that old description: it’s a languid piece of 1960s repetitive articulation. They call it crumbly alt/western and the first part is true. The friable songs appear to be on the verge of falling apart as if at any time they might quit and start again. The weak foundation seems inapposite to the normal needs for a good set of poppy Canned Heat-like vocal harmonies; but the songs manage to exist. Most revolve around his softly guitar strum and odd-ball electronic drum loops. But the production drags this simple front porch music around the back, through the muddy driveway across the lawn into the neighbor’s garden shed where he keeps his stash.
Huge room mic’d drums are turned down in the mix so as not to overpower softly stroked chords in “The History of Astronomy.” But simultaneously, distorted fuzz box keyboard sounds wobble across the melody obscuring all else. With Golden Boots the question is not usually how? It’s why? Dimitri, why is there the sound of somebody grinding a well rosined bow on the violin strings in the right speaker? Is that Xylophone or Zither that I hear with the melodica? Or more importantly: Dude? Where’s my car?
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