THE YAWPERS
Led by dynamic young singer-songwriter Nate Cook, Boulder quartet the Yawpers recall a grittier version of Wilco, with as much raw country sensibility as twisted indie imagination. Equally akin to Deer Tick, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Elvis, The Yawpers give a fresh blend of indie-country and rock ’n’ roll. The Band has just released its debut, full-length record, Capon Crusade.
The Yawpers roar over the roofs of a world filled with the ruined and the forgotten, where big dreams and small towns are pitched to the collective curb, and lost men and con men roam the gutters and pulpits. American Man taps into the disparate, murky pools of the American musical lexicon; dark country to kinetic punk, acid blues to flared jeans boogie, low-brow backdrops pitted against high-minded literary references. It’s an edgy, engrossing trip.
Shimmering against blacktop fever dreams and Elvis’s ghostly sneer are the anarchic impulses of the MC5 and psychedelic muscle of Leslie West’s Mountain and Blue Cheer. Raw and melodic, infectious and irreverent, American Man is an update on the Springsteen tramp’s dream of getting out while you’re young, this time played for the inhalants generation. It’s the suicide rap played out in the desert, without velvet rims or everlasting kisses, the tramp as much a drifter as a romantic.
MAGNOLIA MOUNTAIN
Powerful, soulful, and rootsy, Cincinnati, Ohio's MAGNOLIA MOUNTAIN embraces and explores "That Midwestern Thing" in a big-tent-Americana juggernaut that draws from rock, southern soul, folk, country, bluegrass, blues, and rockabilly. But no matter where they take it, "they have the rare ability to inhabit any branch of Roots music and still sound unmistakably like Magnolia Mountain." (Brian Baker, CityBeat).
