Golden Animals – Jericho Tavern, Oxford, 19/08/09

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While Jack White may have shifted from The White Stripes into a new mode with The Dead Weather, She Keeps Bees are doing the rounds, there are still more guitar/drums duos around. One of the most interesting is surely Golden Animals, whose debut album Free Your Mind and Win a Pony was well-recieved here at TLOBF.

One year to the day after TLOBF published that review of the album, Golden Animals played Oxford’s Jericho Tavern and I was fortunate enough to be there – once I’d found the place. Despite living around here for fifteen years I’d never been to the place before and on arrival, the contrast between the Tavern and Oxford’s other main music venue the O2 Academy is stark. The Jericho Tavern is a small, cosy pub in a rather fashionable part of town, and its upstairs music room feels so intimate and secluded it’s like a secret venue for gigs in some desolate future in which music has been outlawed, or something.

Golden Animals were supported by two bands on the night – the first of these were Vixens, whose music was a mode of skyscraping, frantic rock which tempts music writers to append a post- at the beginning. The music room was extremely empty during the majority of the set, which might have explained the curious apparent lack of enthusiasm from the band’s singer, but nevertheless a good show was put on the few audience members around were suitably warmed up – which was fortunate as most of them were members of the next support band, Spiral 25. A far cry from Vixens, these guys were sunglasses-wearing, long-haired and bearded drone/sludge rockers highly reminiscent of Pontiak among others. Very loud and thunderous, they caused a very strange sensation at times – the singer’s voice seemed occasionally to cause your brain to throb when he held a note, one of those feelings which uneasily straddles pleasure and horror.

After a brief set-up, Golden Animals appeared. Wearing ragged, desert-ified clothes with (in the case of guitarist Tommy Eisner) obvious holes, they looked as if they’d walked a hundred miles to reach the venue, which served to somehow amplify the satisfyingly ramshackle, thrown-together nature of their music. Drummer Linda Beecroft sat on an amazingly high drum stool to play, having her arms down by her thighs as she did so almost all the way through the gig. After a cautious start, the duo gathered pace quickly. The key to a duo like this, of course, is to mesh the drums and guitar perfectly, to create a real sense of drive and propulsion. Golden Animals soon achieved this, using the coruscating, throbbing sound as a platform for Eisner’s yearning, pained and comfortably repititious vocals. The template was possibly at its most effective on the album’s title track, an album copies of which – as an aside – were used as beermats on the merch table by a couple of gig-goers. Suffice it to say, it was a bit of a fist-in-mouth moment.

Compared to the two support bands, whose greater number of members had made them look uneasy and cramped, Golden Animals looked calm and assured as they played, appearing to have acres of space on the Tavern’s very small stage. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies are one of the main appeals of seeing them live – Beecroft in particular is fascinating to watch, as she lords it over her kit as if it is a throne, sat in her elf-like uniform. She had some interesting hi-hat techniques in addition to a tendency to reach for the sky with one arm every now and again. Eisner’s very businesslike – not very chatty, just reliant on his great guitar work to speak volumes for him.

This was a short set which came to a close relatively suddenly, but it was also a masterclass in making the drums/guitar set-up work. In a live setting, Golden Animals are hardly a band that will get people jumping up and down, but their fusion of rock, blues, folk and psychedelia is a heady one, and one which brought a great conclusion to a thoroughly entertaining night of music at this excellently intimate venue.

Photos by Stevie Denyer