Josh Martin’s new record, Western Mind, isn’t trying to depict the American West so much as channel it.
This is the imagined West, the internal West, the one that flashes in memory and myth. And there’s plenty of myth surrounding the West, of course.
Released by Seattle’s Eiderdown Records, the album arrived yesterday in digital and a limited-run cassette edition of 100, complete with screen-printed artwork, fittingly handmade for an album rooted in tactile place.
Martin plays nearly everything on the record (acoustic and electric guitar, upright piano, electronics) using instrumentation as terrain. If American Primitive guitar is often associated with pastoral transcendence, Martin pushes the form into a sort of dream logic.
The track titles trace a road trip through Martin’s Colorado: “Hwy 9,” “Tarryall,” “Crags,” “Westcliffe.” These are both geographical markers and psychological landmarks.
“Hwy 9” is one of the album’s most arresting passages. Martin’s electric guitar drifts, unfurling in a slow-motion haze that feels slightly delirious. There’s a languid, dreamy quality to it: the sensation of driving without a destination, letting the road decide where you’re headed.
It’s here that Martin comes closest to the spectral Americana of William Tyler. Both artists understand that a guitar can function as a landscape more than a lead instrument, a vessel for memory and geography. On “Hwy 9,” Martin taps into that same method, letting tone and space tell the story.
The opener, “Goose Creek,” stays closer to the American Primitive lineage: fingerpicked, almost modest in its simplicity. Yet there’s a quiet magnetism to it, as if Martin is inviting us to step into his world before the abstraction begins.
“Tarryall,” named after a Colorado ghost town, moves deeper into stillness. It’s a slow exhale of a piece, gentle, medicinal in how it softens the nervous system. For the final minute or so of the track, we glimpse the ghosts of Tarryall as the somewhat eerie electronic ambient portion kicks in.
“Hwy 24” drifts into more abstract territory. Ghostly harmonics, faint warble, and what sounds like tape manipulation flutter at the edges like headlights catching road signs. The track is a solitary night drive on a moonlit highway. You sense movement, but everything outside the windshield is unknowable.
“Truck Stop Hymnal” is a surprising burst of light, one of the album’s emotional high points. Where many tracks lean into wandering and wistfulness, this one feels grounded, almost grateful.
Martin’s playing is bright and unguarded. On a record steeped in longing, this track offers a rare moment of quiet certitude. It’s the feeling of finally finding a place to stop, stretch, and breathe.
The album’s standout moment, “Westcliffe,” features Stefan Beck (Golden Brown), whose playing feels like a mirage, a doubling of the self somewhere on the other side of the range. I can think of no other guest musician who would fit this record better than Beck, another Colorado resident and mystic.
Western Mind belongs in the lineage of artists who treat guitar music as spiritual topography, but Martin is working in a different mythological register. He’s sketching not the real West, but the West we so often carry: the internal expanse where longing and imagination meet.
This is a record for day-dreamers and those who know that sometimes the most profound landscapes are the ones in our heads.
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