Golden
Apollo Stars (National Recording Label)

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2003

The standard drill upon dismissing a record like Golden’s Apollo Stars , and I am dismissing it, is to suggest that at least the band sounds as if it’d give you your money’s worth onstage. That half measure not only fails to address why someone should give the album even a cursory spin, it seems in this case to be inaccurate. Despite splashing around in a mild array of groove-oriented styles, mostly funk but also some jam-band noodling and Afrobeat (I’ll defer to Robert Christgau if you demand more specifics on that one), they leave out one crucial ingredient for a kickass groove band, which is a bassist worth his or her salt. The bottom end throughout Apollo Stars is utterly undistinguished, even taking into consideration the closing “Nikki,” which mistakenly presumes that the second half of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Carry On” is the part to steal. But even though more interesting basslines certainly would have helped, it’s unlikely it could have done much; Golden neglect to give any song more than one idea, and what they do come up with gets repeated until leached of its possibility and then repeated a bunch more times for good measure (the instrumental “Henry Earl Ansell” wants to be a “Sleepwalk” for the new millennium but lacks an equally compelling melody or any variation thereof). They touch on slow James Gang-styled metal funk (“The Other Side of the Sun”) and steal part of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (“Ma Petite Est Mariée”) before they’re done, but not before I am.

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