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Listings are
in the opposite order of appearance: headliner is listed at the top,
next is the support band(s),
and the last band listed is the opener.
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Saturday September 9 2017 8:30PM doors -- music at 9:00PM ••• 21 AND OVER $12 in advance / $15 at the door The Yawpers www.theyawpers.com/ Rock and Roll Flexx Bronco www.flexxbronco.com/ Rock n Roll/Punk Skookum wskookumtunes.bandcamp.com/releases rock & roll blues country The Yawpers Nate Cook, Jesse Parmet, Noah Shomberg -from Queen City of the Plains, Denver, CO -The Yawpers’ third album Boy in a Well is a sensational tragedy set in World War I France about a mother abandoning her unwanted newborn child. But, like the band itself, there’s so much more roiling beneath the surface. Recorded in Chicago by Alex Hall (JD McPherson, Pokey LaFarge, The Cactus Blossoms) at Reliable Recordings with production assistance and instrumental contributions from Tommy Stinson (The Replacements, Bash & Pop), Boy in a Well stretches The Yawpers’ sound and ambition in challenging, impassioned, and dynamic directions. To follow up their 2015 Bloodshot debut American Man — which Rolling Stone described as mixing “high-brow smarts with down-home stomp” — the trio left the comfort zone of their Denver hometown in September 2016 to record in a city they’d only briefly visited before. The story-vision was initially conjured by lead singer Nate Cook, after a reckless combination of alcohol, half a bottle of Dramamine, and an early morning flight. The delusional result is an album of complete immersion and instinct, with personal background (the story removes shrapnel embedded from Cook’s failed marriage) meeting psychological fascinations (German realpolitik, Freud, Oedipus, and the lasting social and cultural fallout of WWI… you know, the usual rock ’n’ roll stuff). Structured, composed songwriting from the band’s freakishly tight backbone — guitar prodigy Jesse Parmet and bulldozing drummer Noah Shomberg — blend with the impulsiveness of their wild-eyed, punk-reincarnation-of-Elvis frontman. Boy in a Well sounds like Alan Lomax using his field recorder to capture Mance Lipscomb ripping a laced joint (or something much more potent) with The Cramps and strapping their instruments on to let that shit fly. But while the band dials into the finest, frenetic trucker-speed induced scuzz blues, there is patience and dark soul within and between songs much like the blank space between paragraphs and chapters. Each track is a division of the plot — paired visually with an accompanying comic book, illustrated by J.D. Wilkes of The Legendary Shack Shakers — that seamlessly blends into the next. “Armistice Day” slowly awakens in an altered reality with distant echoing piano, ghostly harmonics, and menacing chants, leading way to “A Decision is Made”, the feverish rockabilly-cum-muscular blues and fuzzed out, grungy, bottleneck slide acoustic guitar force of Parmet. The kinetic “Mon Dieu” reimagines the Dead Kennedys three decades on with its fiery cosmic psychobilly and retro R&B/garage tones. There are solar flashes of surf (“No Going Back”), Bo Diddley’s shaker man shufflin’ groove (“Mon Nom”), the punched out, funky drumming of the Blues Explosion’s Russell Simins (“Face to Face to Face”), and a sulfuric, slicked-up Carl Perkins for the modern world in “Linen for the Orphan.” Later, “Room with a View” is a lonesome ballad that tells the story of the unwanted child growing up in the well where he was abandoned. It’s a touching, melancholy, moral take not typically characteristic of the group. Similarly, a contrast is present in a softer, stripped-down picked-acoustic side in “God’s Mercy”, “A Visitor is Welcomed”, and “The Awe and Anguish” — the latter of which sounds like a lost track from a 1940s Smithsonian Folkways album. Finally, “Reunion” paints a vision of The Who’s Tommy, a fitting bookend to the concept and aural diversity. The Yawpers’ Boy in a Well is complex; it’s a manically conceived, historically situated, emotionally underscored, plot-driven fictive universe. It’s demented, unpredictable, taboo, ambitious, and yet distinctively cohesive. Flexx Bronco Phil Bronco - Guitar, Eroc - Guitar Guy Thunderbird - Bass/Vocals, Thor Bigsby - Drums -from San Francisco, CA -Flexx Bronco is the real deal from San Francisco, California. Everything they do is derived from within. Their writing style, based on collective experiences, influences and lifestyle, exposes many truths found while touring and living it over the past decade. Flexx Bronco is not just a “Rock N' Roll” band. While that is at the heart of what they do, more aptly they embody the essence of it. “A venomous potion somewhere in between, boogie, punk and hard rock, with hard riffing, bold punk attitude and bourbon raining over every tune." (-WWW.AUDIODROME.IT - 2010) Rooted in all aspects of outlaw, Flexx Bronco's influences draw from the bad boys of just about every guitar based genre. The typical Flexx Bronco set spans a variety of genres, ranging from country to rock, blues to pop and alternative, all firmly rooted in the heartbeat of punk rock. The four members of Flexx bronco; Filthy, Eroc, Guy Thunderbird and Thor Bigsby come from very different backgrounds, and once musically combined their songs epitomize explosive, eccentric Rock and Roll decadence. Flexx Bronco takes the listener through the ages with drunken country sing- alongs, heavy garage blues, and then with a single down- beat, jetting them off on a lightning fast full- throttle punk and roll onslaught. Skookum Sean Salazar, Patrick Calilung, Brendan Tidd, Brian Shima -from Oakland, CA -"Skookum showed what would happen if Neil Young and Quicksilver Messenger Service met and had a bastard child. The band would have fit perfectly on the bill at the Fillmore in 1967, with a hard bluesy sound free of pretension and artifice." - SF Sonic, 2016 |
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