The Winter of Our Discotheque is an album with two personalities. Its first half is a brilliant, fuzzy psychedelic rambler of pop, alt-country, and garage rock fitted to strong melodies and shuffling experimentation. Its second half sputters a bit, the experimentation and excellent tunes shelved in favor of hazy atmospherics and an overall feeling of semi-aimless demos. Despite the lackluster slow-burning second act, the strong songwriting and consistently compelling paranoid lyrics make the entire affair memorable. When Golden Boots are good, they're really good. The first five songs feel like an indie car crash where Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band meets the Beta Band, Big Star, and the chiming guitars of Vampire Weekend. If that sounds a bit off-kilter, it's part of the charm, and the group's Arizona calling card is evident throughout thanks to the production's spacious echoing textures that instantly recall the desert. The four-song arc from Easy Lie to Ghosts is particularly strong, featuring wonky guitars, raspy vocals, and fabulously incongruent patches of dub, country, and outright outsider pop. Black and Blue in particular feels like a long lost Neutral Milk Hotel song, with all its fuzzy tones and equally fuzzy vocals undercut by slabs of guitar sunshine. Expertly delivered lyrics like "This is the story how it all went down...Find the exits before you light the match and burn it down" are humorous and simultaneously somewhat spooky. The goofily fantastic Country Bat High II seems ripped right from Magical Mystery Tour. Though the closing numbers don't match the brilliance of what's come before, The Winter of Our Discotheque suggests a band strong enough to follow proudly in the footsteps of all the previously mentioned bands. Unlike many psychedelic albums, there's not an iota of pretension on display. In this sense, a comparison might be drawn to a group like the Flaming Lips, who share a similar ability to marry fractured psychedelia with catchy melodies and human-interest themes. Golden Boots are in good company. ~ Tim DiGravina, Rovi

1		Heatwave
2		Easy Lie
3		Country Bat High ll
4		Black and Blue
5		Ghosts
6		Love Is In the Air
7		Knife
8		Make Believe
9		Savior's Sky
10		Fear

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