Golden Calves

My review of an early project from Wooden Wand's James Jackson Toth runs today at Dusted...it's not a uniformly enjoyable listen, but sort of interesting...

Golden Calves
Money Band / Century Band
Woodsist

James Jackson Toth was just 18 when he recorded this material, not long out of Purchase College and just discovering the outer fringes of folk, free jazz and noise. Four-tracked in mostly one- and two-minute bursts, these are fragile, fragmentary ideas, not nearly cooked enough to qualify as songs, not wild enough to make the cut as improvisatory noise. A decade later, critics would take Toth to task for releasing every fucking thing that ever came into his head, exhausted and bewildered by the two and three full-lengths a year that spewed forth under various permutations of the name Wooden Wand. Here is where it starts, Toth, barely legal to vote, already spouting reams of unfinished, tossed off, poorly played, fuzzily recorded, and yet intermittently affecting material.

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