Amplified is a column focusing on small and emerging artists. If your band fits the bill, drop us a line at amplified@metalinsider.net.
We’re a few months removed from the chaos of Gwar-BQ, but one of the bands that had stood out to me was one of the festival’s many fun outliers – Sawyer Family, who were totally unfamiliar at the time, but were one of the few so fascinating that I stayed for their entire set in the middle of so many bands worth seeing. Maybe it was the upright bass that drew me over.
Sawyer Family are in a niche all their own, drawing from a bunch of different styles while making it their own. There’s some of the obvious rockabilly sort of influence, a little punk, a little vaguely creepy backwoods folk music, but tracks like “Blooditorial” and “Monochrome” from their self-titled latest record show off a monstrous, thudding stoner rock core at the heart of it all. Some of the fuzz riffs on this record are such that, if you showed them to Josh Homme, he’d be sincerely pissed they weren’t Queens of the Stone Age songs. It all comes together, musically and in the band’s overall vibe, in a way that’s very carefully orchestrated and with a sense of mystique about them. This band works so well and won me over pretty much immediately.
Stream it below, buy it here.
