The state of California is too large and diverse to have a defining sound. But say that something sounds like California rock circa the 1960s or early 70s, and people have a pretty good idea what you're talking about. The Golden State band Golden Animals mine that particular epoch of mild psych and blues rock-- especially the middle part, when 60s idealism gave way to the dope-daze haze of the 70s-- for all it's worth on Free Your Mind and Win a Pony, the duo's solid enough debut. What possessed guitarist Tommy Eisner (originally from Baltimore) and drummer Linda Beecroft (from Sweden) to specifically aim for the Doors above all else could well be a mix of laziness and audacity. Yet the music here is really-- to paraphrase Robert Christgau tackling the Cult aping Led Zeppelin-- the Doors simplified, with the band hitting all the major beats but falling short of anything cosmic.
Whether this is by design or default is up for debate, but it does allow the group to skirt some of the many pitfalls that felled the Doors. In 2009, several of Jim Morrison's most glaring pretensions have been diffused by decades of parody (and this heaped upon his own tragic tendency toward self-parody); his moan remains a sort of shorthand for the milieu that countless bands-- cool and lame alike-- have mimicked or mocked. Where Eisner falls on the sincerity scale is anyone's guess, but certainly a few times over the course of the disc's brisk runtime you can almost sense the glint of a slight grin, as if he realizes the band is essentially a big goof and he's relishing the retread experience.
You can't turn back time, but songs such as "I Want You to Come" and "Queen Mary (The Flop)" are so fully of another age that the approximation is just as fun as it is uncanny. You can thank producer Chris Coady for that, or just as likely Thom Monahan for his retro mix assist. Heck, you could even credit hippie-cult author Gordon Kennedy, whose Salton Sea home Eisner and Beecroft supposedly house-sat during the making of this record, a home apparently packed with Aquarian Age artifacts and LPs. But most of all you can thank Eisner and Beecroft for recognizing that to do this kind of thing right, you have to dive in wholeheartedly.
It also helps that Eisner and Beecroft pilfer 60s signifiers but avoid borrowing some of the time's hoarier freak-out clichés. Indeed, if the Doors are reference no. 1, no. 2 are any number of blues-rock bands who knew that the power of a good searing lead or slide guitar trumps wacky hallucinogenic gimmicks any day. The mojo the pair capture on even a short track like "Alice" is impressive, and even if it doesn't sound like enough to sustain much more than a single album's worth of rearview mirror novelty, it's more than enough to sustain these 30 minutes of entertaining nostalgia.
