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.

The Denver-based Yawpers’ unique set up---overdriven acoustic guitars and drums, equal parts frenzy, solemnity, and menace---alchemically binds snotty rawk ‘n’ roll to the hopeful and fuses the elemental power of the RIFF to the intimacy of a sunset-bound road trip.

With a voice weaving between a folk club’s smoky rasp and an arena’s bombastic howl, singer/guitarist Nate Cook is a lounge lizard charmer, a smooth snake-oil salesman, and sharp-tongued, keen-eyed poet. Battering-ram drummer Noah Shomberg also brings a refined touch exhibiting his formal training. Jesse Parmet’s guitar is an aural cross-section of the ferocious and raw proletarian roots of Uncle Tupelo to the burning-hot thrashings of Hot Snakes, as much Son House’s delta as Hell’s Angels’ Altamont. Together, the Yawpers have forged a well-defined identity: a general disdain for the conventional with a sonic depth that never loses its accessibility.