Taking their name from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the Yawpers have a high-brow literary streak that’s often at odds with the lowbrow messiness of their rock’n’roll. Frontman Nate Cook devised the story of the Denver trio’s third album, Boy in a Well, while tripping on Dramamine during a long flight, and it has something to do with France in World War I and a woman abandoning her son in a well. Good luck following the plot. It’s really just a high-falutin’ structure for this album, each song relating a different chapter and corresponding with an accompanying graphic novel illustrated by JD Wilkes (who also did the cover art). But there’s something lofty and worthwhile in the lowly rock’n’roll mudpit they wallow in, something compelling in their mix of gutbucket rockabilly and psychotic blues, which allows them to transcend the practiced chaos of Deer Tick and O’Death and so many other bands who insist that they rock more than they actually rock.
Maybe it’s the line-up. The Yawpers deviate from the typical rock band arsenal; in particular, like the White Stripes, they jettison the bass guitar completely. Instead, they have a particular nimble drummer named Noah Shomberg, an electric guitar player schooled in blues and metal named Jesse Parmet, and finally Cook himself, who strums a guitar haphazardly and sings like Elvis by way of Lux Interior by way of Jack White. And while they don’t quite have the charisma of those acts, together they kick up a fuss on opener “Armistice Day,” which forestalls its big moment as long as they can hold out. When they finally let loose around the three-minute mark and Cook howls viciously, the result isn’t just visceral, but downright gory.
Boy in a Well was recorded in Chicago with Tommy Stinson producing, so the Yawpers obviously have a good mentor in making a hot mess. He provides what the liners call a “piano freakout” on “Face to Face to Face,” but really every song here contains some kind of freakout, as the trio have as much disregard for rock song structures as they have for rock line-ups. “The Awe and the Anguish” opens as a back-porch blues number, colored by Parmet’s scratchy slide guitar, a bit too earnest in its authenticity and audacity. Without warning, the song explodes into a furious Led Zeppelin stomp, loud and lurching. The Yawpers understand the need for dynamics, drawing you in on quiet songs like “Room With a View” just so they can better blast your eardrums on “A Decision Is Made.”
Theirs is an expansive vision of rock’n’roll, one that cherrypicks from various folk traditions: punk, rockabilly, blues, whatever they might have on hand or find in the trash. At times the project gets away from them, and the trio struggle to wrangle so many different sounds all at once without pushing too hard or yelling too precociously. “A Decision Is Made” sounds convincingly feral, but the Yawpers rage gratuitously, as though the ramshackle aesthetic of the song were an end in itself. Maybe that’s why they ratchet these songs to that cumbersome WWI narrative: to give direction and purpose to the din. More often than not, they make the whole big mess work, even if they can’t make you care whether or not that damn boy even makes it out of the well.
