Golden Animals

Happy Parts Recordings and the outstandingly rocking Golden Animals are happy to give to you four new songs while the band is busy completing their full-length debut in Joshua Tree. Who are the Golden Animals? They are Tommy Eisner on guitar and vocals and Linda Beecroft on drums and vocals. He looks like Jimmy Page's younger brother. She looks like the sultry free spirit of the hippie wilderness. Their album is being produced by Chris Coady (who has worked with TV On The Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blonde Redhead) and mixed by TJ Doherty (among whose credits inlcude Wilco, Sonic Youth, Joana Newsome).

I'm digging the Animals and so should you. They bring to mind a classic, alluring mix of seemingly disparate elements through the ages like The Seeds, Creedence, The Knitters, The Mama's & The Papa's, The Dave Clark Five, Black Keys, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Jon Spencer meets John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Hound Dog Taylor meets Gram Parsons. Any resemblance to that new wierd America/freak folk stuff is clearly by mistake.

Here's a couple tunes to get the party started. Then go and Download the Golden Animals EP here. You'll be happy that you did. - Some Velvet Blog

Sometimes you can tell what a musician is going to sound like simply by looking at his or her photo. Judging on appearance alone, Nick Cave couldn’t really do anything but sing graveyard songs in a voice like a dirt road. Kurt Cobain didn’t have to open his mouth to prove that he was the ultimate grunge rocker. If you’re like me and you like to play this guessing game, your first look at the duo performing under the moniker Golden Animals is likely to confuse your radar. These two solemn-eyed, river-haired, flower-children types with thrift store peasant blouses and arresting stares left me, at least, stymied for an instant categorization. What to expect from this band? Blues? Tree-hugging folk? Psychedelic rock? Four-hour instrumentals?

Just like mama always told you, appearances can be deceiving, because none of those categories particularly fit this music (especially not the last one). As more and more critics and listeners catch wind of what Golden Animals are creating, everyone is having trouble coming up with the proper category in which to place them. And that’s a compliment.

It’s not folk. It’s not blues. But it’s somewhere in the middle, and that’s the best attempt I can make. Tommy Honeywell and Linda Beecroft, the creative forces behind Golden Animals, are creating something successful partially because they’re not bound into a type. Theirs is a loose, energetic sound, catchy and sweet, with back road rhythms and infectious vocals that loop up and down over curious, sometimes humorous lyrics. Some will hear early Bob Dylan. Others will swear Devendra Banhart opened the door that Golden Animals walked through. Even the White Stripes have had their name thrown into the mix.

“We are heavy into blues, particularly the sacred songs,” says Honeywell when asked about influences. “Old blues men and women could just get up there together with a guitar and make you skip, jump, or fly away. It’s old magic, and it was born in this country. There’s a tradition in the blues of man and woman duos performing together: Blind Willie Johnson and Willie B. Harris, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, Charley Patton and Bertha Lee, among many more. There’s something very honest and natural in the boy/girl performance of the blues we really dig.”

And Golden Animals is nothing if not, in a sense, a classic boy/girl story. Honeywell tells the story of how he met Beecroft in charmingly traditional terms that make it sound as though the pair exists on a different plane than the rest of us. “We were passing each other on the street in Brooklyn one night,” says Honeywell. “I stopped Linda because something told me to. Linda is from Sweden and I’m from Baltimore, so to be together we had to travel (even the law wanted us moving around together).”

From that first meeting, the pair set about developing a history, finding that their music meshed as well as their personalities. They went to Europe together and spent some time wandering around the party scene in Paris and other major cities. “We are both travelers and have needed to be constantly moving. That has been part of our bond and how we have been able to stay together,” Honeywell explains. “We’d go to parties in Europe just like that: walk in, find some half-finished glasses of red wine, and start playing. It made me more aware of not just being a gee-tar player, but an American one. When we moved back to New York, Linda got a drum kit, and that was our last major musical advancement to present.”

After returning stateside, the pair continued to hone their skills, developing what has quickly become a distinctly fresh American sound in an American setting. “When we played New York,” says Honeywell, “people always started dancing, which in New York is like seeing atheists fall to their knees and begin praying.”

Their fans will attest to that. What is striking about Golden Animals is the instantaneous sense of transport their music creates. There’s an immediate mood shift in the room from the moment the track begins. The songs move naturally, yet surprisingly, in a comfortable progression that manages to sound organic, as if they grew that way, yet they’re still winningly fresh and quite unlike anything else. It’s sort of like watching flower seeds grow: you know it’s going to happen, but you’re still surprised by the result.

Golden Animals have long flown under the radar, with a few discreet interviews here and there, a self-released EP, and little more than a MySpace page and local word of mouth for promo. “Outside of New York, we’re amazed that people have found us. We had no promoter or anything like that, we just made a MySpace page, and the flame has been growing,” Honeywell says. “The fact that anyone knows of us at this point speaks more of the rate at which the underground is becoming increasingly accessible through the internet.”

Electric Moonlight Garden, the band’s three-track EP, is available on iTunes and in select record stores, as w - Crawdaddy

WHEN THE TWOSOME WHO MAKE UP THE GORGEOUS BAND GOLDEN ANIMALS MET ONE NIGHT ON A BROOKLYN STREET CORNER, THEY NEVER EXPECTED TO BE GUIDING THE FUTURE OF FOLK TOGETHER

In a slightly crushed top hat and a buttoned peasant shirt, Tommy Eisner could easily be peddling snake oil. Sitting beside Linda Beecroft, 26—a striking, tall drummer whose blonde tresses tumble past her shoulders like a Victorian heroine—the two cut anachronistic figures even in a corner of an East Village coffee shop.

But the 23-year-old singer/guitarist for vaudevillian blues-folk two-piece Golden Animals isn’t shilling remedies—he’s extolling the virtues of MySpace, the main outlet by which the band has introduced a sound that’s as colorfully nostalgic as its wardrobe. Golden Animals’ carefully crafted songs recall the Beatles and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The pair set romantic slice-of-life lyrics to jazzily strummed guitars and simple, stompy drums that wouldn’t sound misplaced crackling through an old gramophone. The couple even met the old-fashioned way: on a Brooklyn street the night Swedish Beecroft arrived from Paris. “I stopped her,” recalls Eisner, who relocated from Baltimore to Williamsburg in 2003. “That proves it’s rewarding to be bold. I have no idea how I had the balls to do it that night.” The pair immediately connected and began traveling the world together; Eisner would perform folk songs on their journeys. But after Beecroft jokingly joined him on drums one night in their home studio, they realized the extent of their good fortune. “We played a show four days later,” Beecroft says. “Which went a lot better than all of my solo shows,” Eisner adds.

So far, Golden Animals has self-released the three-track Electric Moonlight Garden EP. Next, a small label run by a fellow folkie will put out a 7-inch of the band’s songs while it moves to Los Angeles and records a full-length LP that could very well be full of rather unexpected inspirations. “We’re both huge Nirvana fans,” Eisner reveals. “We definitely came from folk, but I love rock and roll and Linda really loves punk. We listen to Marc Bolan, too. That’s someone we put on sometimes to do aerobic workouts.” Caryn Ganz

CARYN GANZ Have you been compared to the White Stripes yet?
TOMMY EISNER No, because we wear blue and white. Actually, that’s not true. We played a festival, and another two-piece was on later and I heard some drunk guy say, “It’s the White Stripes!” I was like, thank God that guy wasn’t here when we were playing. That would have really been demoralizing. Working with just guitar and drums, we’re taking on a new way of arranging music that I think has not been explored very much. When I see a band that’s six or seven people now, I’m like, come on, why?
CG What do you write about?
TE Traveling, love, and the struggle to not feel oppressed right now. Hopefully, some sort of revolutionary spirit is emerging that will give everyone hope and make life seem more exciting. I think we’re in a real spiritual fight against something oppressive that’s happened in this country and in New York over the last ten years.
CG People have described your semiregular Butterfly Cabaret—an anything-goes evening of music and artistic expression in Brooklyn—as an antidote to boring nightlife. What is that, exactly?
LINDA BEECROFT We invited a couple of bands to play in this art gallery; it’s a unique space and we wanted to do it somewhere that was not by any means uptight.
TE I guess the idea was a carnival kind of atmosphere where everyone’s a part of whatever’s going on. We plan to keep doing them in L.A.
CG Where do you see your band fitting into the current freak-folk scene?
TE I don’t like the term freak folk. I think it’s really stupid.
CG So how would you describe what you do?
TE Freak folk. That’s probably the only thing that would mean anything to anyone. But I’d never say that…again.
CG What’s the freakiest thing that’s happened to you as a band?
LB Ending up in the Sahara Desert.
TE We were eating at a Moroccan restaurant in London with all these beautiful tapestries and old chandeliers and lamps, and were like, Morocco is looking right on! We found out that it was two hours away, so we were like, fuck it, let’s buy a ticket. We overheard some people on the Tube say they were coming from Morocco, and they were like, “You’ve got to go to the Nomad Palace.” So we had this name, Mohammad, with a phone number.
LB We were in a taxi for fourteen hours in Africa. That’s where the photo from the cover of our Electric Moonlight Garden EP came from.
CG The band’s name has a mystical, ancient quality to it. Where did it come from?
TE We showed up at the Nomad Palace at three a.m., and this guy outside was like, “You’re musicians, what’s your band’s name?” I was really happy that we weren’t like, “We’re the Red Lipstick and the Plastic Toasters.” We have a very organic style, we don’t use any kind of drum machines or synthesizers, so we wanted a name th - V magazine

Thank Devendra Banhart. Since the freak-folk superstar made his mark in 2004 with the critically acclaimed, mish-mash ode to Tiny Tim and hippie harmony, Rejoicing in the Hands, the long-haired child has spawned an entire subculture of wavy-maned musicians intent on undermining mainstream pop's artistic assembly line. I'm not complaining, and neither should you.


The most interesting and perhaps unfamiliar of these offspring is Brooklyn, New York's very own Golden Animals. Not surprisingly, this duo - comprised of mop-topped guitarist Tommy Eisner and sun-kissed drummer Linda Beecroft - is the physical embodiment of the neo-psychedelic movement: all wild hair, rustically romantic garb and sepia-toned mysticism. Better than that, though, Golden Animals signifies a slight stylistic shift from the Banhart/Joanna Newsomian approach we've grown accustomed to. With eclectic instrumentation, kick-up-your-heels lyricism and jaunty harmonizing, Eisner and Beecroft seem to be crafting a personal patchwork of the New Weird American sound.

Golden Animals easily fits in with acts like Baltimore's Entrance, the lanky bluesman obsessed with Robert Johnson and the dark arts. But the band fares better when not compared to anyone at all; I prefer to simply let the music speak for itself. It articulates volumes through rural rhythms and a handful of carefully chosen, delightfully witty words.

All these alluring attributes aside, Golden Animals is still under-the-radar. The pair's self-released EP Electric Moonlight Garden has not met a record deal yet and, as such, isn't available for mass purchase. You can, however, enjoy the three marvelous tracks found below and keep an eye out for new material via the couple's Myspace. If you live in Brooklyn or any of its immediate surrounding areas, you might be lucky enough to catch one of the band's lively monthly happenings, better known as the "Butterfly Cabaret." In the coming months keep an eye out for Golden Animals's limited edition 7" vinyl collaboration with former Women and Children member Jamie Moon, as well as a debut album, which is tenatively set for a summer 2007 unveiling.

In the meantime be patient. Lest we forget, grassroots efforts are the foundation upon which the folk generation - and this blog - were built.
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"Sweetheart of the Rodeo" had steeped in hipster consciousness and the counter-culture was embracing country music with a vengeance. From the warm, natural recording quality right down to the sepia-toned cover art dressed as (stoned) old west dandies, these guys are living the life!"
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