Sometimes you can tell what a musician is going to sound like simply by looking at his or her photo. Judging on appearance alone, Nick Cave couldn’t really do anything but sing graveyard songs in a voice like a dirt road. Kurt Cobain didn’t have to open his mouth to prove that he was the ultimate grunge rocker. If you’re like me and you like to play this guessing game, your first look at the duo performing under the moniker Golden Animals is likely to confuse your radar. These two solemn-eyed, river-haired, flower-children types with thrift store peasant blouses and arresting stares left me, at least, stymied for an instant categorization. What to expect from this band? Blues? Tree-hugging folk? Psychedelic rock? Four-hour instrumentals?

Just like mama always told you, appearances can be deceiving, because none of those categories particularly fit this music (especially not the last one). As more and more critics and listeners catch wind of what Golden Animals are creating, everyone is having trouble coming up with the proper category in which to place them. And that’s a compliment.

It’s not folk. It’s not blues. But it’s somewhere in the middle, and that’s the best attempt I can make. Tommy Honeywell and Linda Beecroft, the creative forces behind Golden Animals, are creating something successful partially because they’re not bound into a type. Theirs is a loose, energetic sound, catchy and sweet, with back road rhythms and infectious vocals that loop up and down over curious, sometimes humorous lyrics. Some will hear early Bob Dylan. Others will swear Devendra Banhart opened the door that Golden Animals walked through. Even the White Stripes have had their name thrown into the mix.

“We are heavy into blues, particularly the sacred songs,” says Honeywell when asked about influences. “Old blues men and women could just get up there together with a guitar and make you skip, jump, or fly away. It’s old magic, and it was born in this country. There’s a tradition in the blues of man and woman duos performing together: Blind Willie Johnson and Willie B. Harris, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, Charley Patton and Bertha Lee, among many more. There’s something very honest and natural in the boy/girl performance of the blues we really dig.”

And Golden Animals is nothing if not, in a sense, a classic boy/girl story. Honeywell tells the story of how he met Beecroft in charmingly traditional terms that make it sound as though the pair exists on a different plane than the rest of us. “We were passing each other on the street in Brooklyn one night,” says Honeywell. “I stopped Linda because something told me to. Linda is from Sweden and I’m from Baltimore, so to be together we had to travel (even the law wanted us moving around together).”

From that first meeting, the pair set about developing a history, finding that their music meshed as well as their personalities. They went to Europe together and spent some time wandering around the party scene in Paris and other major cities. “We are both travelers and have needed to be constantly moving. That has been part of our bond and how we have been able to stay together,” Honeywell explains. “We’d go to parties in Europe just like that: walk in, find some half-finished glasses of red wine, and start playing. It made me more aware of not just being a gee-tar player, but an American one. When we moved back to New York, Linda got a drum kit, and that was our last major musical advancement to present.”

After returning stateside, the pair continued to hone their skills, developing what has quickly become a distinctly fresh American sound in an American setting. “When we played New York,” says Honeywell, “people always started dancing, which in New York is like seeing atheists fall to their knees and begin praying.”

Their fans will attest to that. What is striking about Golden Animals is the instantaneous sense of transport their music creates. There’s an immediate mood shift in the room from the moment the track begins. The songs move naturally, yet surprisingly, in a comfortable progression that manages to sound organic, as if they grew that way, yet they’re still winningly fresh and quite unlike anything else. It’s sort of like watching flower seeds grow: you know it’s going to happen, but you’re still surprised by the result.

Golden Animals have long flown under the radar, with a few discreet interviews here and there, a self-released EP, and little more than a MySpace page and local word of mouth for promo. “Outside of New York, we’re amazed that people have found us. We had no promoter or anything like that, we just made a MySpace page, and the flame has been growing,” Honeywell says. “The fact that anyone knows of us at this point speaks more of the rate at which the underground is becoming increasingly accessible through the internet.”

Electric Moonlight Garden, the band’s three-track EP, is available on iTunes and in select record stores, as well as through MySpace. Their first full-length album is slated to appear on HappyParts Recordings in November. The band, now relocated to California, has just completed work in the studio.

As attention increases, Golden Animals probably won’t be changing much. Unlike other bands who might actively seek the spotlight, this pair seems content to keep creating and watching things develop around them. As is strikingly evident in their music, they’re doing this because they love it, not because they have some long-term goal of folk-blues domination. “We don’t care to look too far ahead,” Honeywell explains. “As long as we’ve been collaborating together, we just go on intuition on every move we make and follow where that leads us. Part of living this way is not really having plans or specific hopes, just the feeling that you are getting where you’re going and not staying where you don’t belong.”

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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