Two Citizen Dick favorites are joining forces to hit you with a tremendous, super-duper limited edition split single. Wand and Golden Boots each have two tracks on a seven inch from People in a Position to Know Records. (That’s a lot of orange in the last sentence, but the last one is the important one, as it’s the place that you buy this thing.) Only 300 copies were pressed and they’re on funky, multi-colored vinyl. This thing is going to sell out and you’re going to be stuck buying it from some asshole on ebay for ten grand, so do yourself a favor and shoot over to PIAPTK and snag one before the shelves are bare. If you’re not a collector by nature, we’ve summed up the virtues of the four tracks below to give you some incentive to hunt this thing down.
Side A, Track 1 – “Dirty Penny” – Wand: This one showcases that “brilliantly simple and dark country blues balladry” that Kevin loves so much. It’s good. As a listener, you kind of wait for it to kick in, swing for the fences with a huge slide guitar and drum explosion, but that never comes, which leads to a kind of refreshingly sustained tension. And. This might be the first (and only) song ever recorded that might be about this. (“I mean, hey, I haven’t touched anything that’s been in their ass.”)
Side A, Track 2 – “(I’m Afraid of) Little Girls” – Wand: James Toth is a funny dude. In a (we’re assuming) tongue in cheek screed on the fairer sex, he lists all sorts of things he’d rather tangle with than little girls, culminating with “send the yeti or the chupacabra, I may give them a fight, but keep that little girl outta my sight.” Yeah. I got to the end of the tune, hit replay and laughed my ass off. “What are you afraid of a little girl? I said, Charlie, little girls are eviler than anything else in the whole wide world.” Good times.
Side B, Track 1 – “Passers By” – Golden Boots: Golden Boots tone down the “alt-alt” part and focus way in on the “country.” Over a deeply twangy bass line, a plaintive harmonica leads into an introspective and lonely rumination on the way that people drift through our lives. “I wonder when you said ‘farewell,’ did you really mean ‘goodbye?’” This is another solid slow burner. Golden Boots add little flourishes as the tune progresses (a tap on the side of a snare with increasing frequency, a sweet, slightly distorted guitar solo), but the track’s about atmosphere and harmony. It rules.
Side B, Track 2 – “A Nothing” – Golden Boots: Golden Boots are not a one-trick pony. They can pull off the straight-ahead delivery of a tune like “Passers By” or they can kick into a slightly more adventurous gear for a song like this one. There are some electronic deedly-doots populating the higher registers on this one, a buried and distorted slide guitar and some spacey vocals. If you weren’t all over Winter of our Discoteque, this is a solid way to wrap your brain around what this band has to offer: things that are soothing and things that are interesting.
It would really be a dick move for us to give you any of the songs on this thing, because there are only four of them. We don’t want to leave you hanging with no afternoon tunes, however, so we’ve got a Wand track from Hard Knox and a Golden Boots tune from Burning Brain.
“Beginnings of Modern Astronomy” – Golden Boots
To sum up, you’re going to love this thing, it’ll probably appreciate enough to put your kids through college and you can buy it here.
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