Prairiewolf – “Roadside Bandit Type” 
If you’ve kept your ears perked to the cosmic corners of the Americana landscape then its quite possible that the name Prairiewolf has filtered your way through their live recordings and a cut that cropped up on WFMU’s The Frow Show a little while back. The trio pairs RSTB fave Stefan Beck (Golden Brown) with a couple of heads that have found their way to the other side of the fold, trading curation and critique for their own offerings at the altar of ether. Jeremy Erwin (who you may know from the Miles-centric blog The Heat Warps) and Tyler Wilcox (bylines in Aquarium Drunkard, Pitchfork and Maggot Brain) corner out the combo on keys and bass respectively. The Wolf is both cosmically aligned with Beck’s other works and a bit divergent. Where some ambient country creeps into the sounds on Golden Brown, here there’s an axis of psychedelic jazz, pastoral nodes of the German Progressive pantheon, and the elevated eclecticism of Sandy Bull. “Roadside Bandit Type” stretches between these leylines, finding its footing in a fragrant fog of keys and navigating through the dawnlight haze with rhythm and texture as compass and calculation.
As Erwin notes, “The approach we take to “Roadside Bandit Type” always feels straight from the 1975 Miles Davis playbook, where rhythm, texture and a desire to keep the song evolving supersede all. We obviously interpret those things in our own way, but when the core of the song is barely more than 3 notes and a Bossa Nova beat on a drum machine, fooling around with rhythm and texture, sometimes rhythm as texture, allows you to get pretty far out there.” Beck adds, “I’m playing on the wrong side of the steel bar to get some ghostly overtones and harmonics. I really like all of the weird resonance and extra sounds that come out of this instrument and it worked really well with Jeremy’s open ended composition here.” The song captures the core of Prairiewolf, a sound that’s high and lonesome, rhythmic and resplendent. The band’s eponymous album is out May 5th from Centripetal Force Records.
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