In the mood for garage-y, rough-hewn, slide guitar-infested Acid Blues Rock for the masses? The Yawpers are all of that and more. In this day and age of compression-flattened recordings and auto-tuned horseshit played off as edgy, The Yawpers thankfully cut through that mess with blatantly loose and fun yet sometimes poignant grooves.
Hailing from Denver, The Yawpers are a blue-collar trio that will not hesitate to snarl. While many music critics and writers have gone out of their way to throw out every anti-nuanced adjective they can think of to describe The Yawpers, at this point in the music world’s trajectory, it is best to say they are Rock & Roll as it was meant to be — edgy and tough and featuring a murder song or two.
I first became hip to The Yawpers when I heard their new album, American Man (the band’s first for Bloodshot Records), streaming online and I turned the volume up immediately. The band’s name is a twist on a verse in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from the poet’s classic Leaves of Grass collection) that reads, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” The Yawpers’ free local tour stop is a good chance to get stupid cool with a band that may be on the rise should the lost musical Diaspora suddenly be in the mood for a good old-fashioned Rock & Roll jolt.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2015.
