Golden Brown

Colorado guitarist Stefan Beck has made a habit of cropping up here, both in solo guise as Golden Brown, and with his deep vibe trio Prairiewolf. Across labels like Aural Canyon, Eiderdown and Inner Islands, Golden Brown has often woven the tails of Cosmic Americana, Folk, and ambient, with a focus on fingerpicked forms. Though, on his latest it appears that the walls between GB and the Wolf are beginning to wear thin. Quite a bit of Prairiewolf’s twilight shiver sneaks into Whisker Fatigue. The record starts out deep in the darkness of dub, a gooey, irradiated epic named for an extinct frog that finds Beck as entrenched in the humid highlands as he’s ever been. The record doesn’t leave the dubplate there, either, slipping further into the ether on the title track. The rubbery textures make this a more summer-bound platter, a counterpoint to Golden Brown’s bouts of icy ambiance and autumnal hues that have found their way into the works in the past.

The gooey gravity is released by the album’s midpoint, but there’s never a real return to the light, even on the ambient jazz turn of “Cross Pollination,” possibly the album’s lightest fare. The aura turns towards twilight on the album’s other epically-sized anchor point, “Boom Boom Pachyderm,” a song that sees Beck pull fellow Prairiewolf member Jeremy Erwin into the mix with an array of keys that up the prog factor and feels like its operating much in the same vein as the trio’s work. Though, the dub streaks mark “Pachyderm” as something a bit more sinister than the Wolf’s usual Cosmic American corner of the prog pond. The album closes out with an otherworldly shimmer, cementing a new chapter for Golden Brown, one that’s not borne out of the pastoral, Western front, but somewhere deeper, danker; swamp-swaddled topography that’s far and away from the mountain zones of Beck’s Colorado confines.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.