The fine folks of Frontier Folk Nebraska hearken their return to this year’s Whispering Beard Festival with an offering of new music, Frontier F**k Nebrask, an album steeped in the lazy swagger and inverted braggadocio these Cincinnati natives have accepted, nay, presented, as their calling card. Rock and roll, my friends, is dirty, and these Ohioans, not Nebraskans, intend to wrestle a bit in the muck and the mire. And lo, should you find yourself led astray, the lofty ideals, writ with delicate notes, of a band that has dug deep, will bring you where you are meant to go. 

While Whispering Beard is, so I’m lead to believe, a quiet-minded festival with dulcet tunes wafting in and out of the late summer breeze, Frontier Folk Nebraska will bring with them the volume some of the more intimate acts will forego during their sets. It’s not folk, but there is a folksiness about what they do, and though they call Cincinnati home, it’s hard not to hear the unmistakable loneliness and solitude of a hazy Nebraska dusk, guitar driven sunsets and whiskey bottle rattles of another day spent working, creating, living.

They’re not stalwarts, but they know what they’re about, and any live performance of theirs - which, recently, seems to be a somewhat fewer and farther between - is reason to celebrate, though what you’ll toast while instruments caterwaul around you is a personal choice. Which only makes sense, as Frontier Folk Nebraska continues to create genuinely personal music.