Golden Brown

Now a longtime fixture on the site, Colorado’s Stefan Beck has a growing collection of releases as Golden Brown, and has already hit the mid-year essentials list with the debut release from Prairiewolf. For his latest under the former moniker, he’s taken pains to strip back his sound, eschewing a bit of the kosmiche synth cocoon that had begun to creep in on last year’s Luminous and it’s predecessor, Gems and Minerals. On Wide Ranging Rider the guitar takes its place at the center, with recordings often stripped back to their core. A few keys sneak into the mix, but they serve to frame the ripple of stings, mingling with cello and a prepared guitar technique that implements the percussive buzz of paper inserted between the strings. The resulting album is as clear and resonant as any in his oeuvre, an album inspired by dreams that maintains a feeling of slipping behind the veil of sleep.

The opener rambles with a certain quality of the West, rooted in fingerstyle blues, but picking up something distinctly tied to the open skies and serrated vistas of Beck’s Colorado home. The dreamlike quality coats the works on WRR, guiding the listener through playas of the mind. Occasionally mists rise up from the edges, but more often than not the obscurity that’s implied is hung on a heatwarp haze that vibrates around the record. The saunter of strings leads us through the album’s narrative like a guideline to the unconscious mind. Golden Brown has grown over the years from something that seeped out through self-released gems to this vinyl debut, a record that’s as assured as Beck’s ever sounded. Gorgeous and glistening, whether this is your starting point with the outfit or you too have taken the journey over the years, Wide Ranging Rider wraps its arms around the listener without reservations.