Local Psych-Heads Yaupon Holly Double Down and Break the Bank with their Latest Pummeling Single 

Heading at you with rolled-up sleeves and tube amps a-blazin’, local garage-fiends Yaupon Holly are the apparent chimera of Motörhead and Mudhoney and their recent single “No Aces” is intent on banging your head via generous skull-crackery.

Kicking off with an impressive jazzy intro by drummer Michael Glime, “No Aces” shows its hand immediately with guitarists Marcelo Celi and Bryson Hunt weeping into the mix with feedback squalls. Bass guitarist Padraig Mee goes “full Geezer” and keeps the wheels of “No Aces” on track. Vocalist Jason Kerr delivers a remarkable throat-injuring performance that is one shot Lemmy Kilmister, one shot Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

Freakout guitar breaks abound throughout “No Aces” and at song’s end they veer off into a lock-and-load riff with the guitars clearing out any remaining congested neurons left in the listeners’ brains. Considering their relatively young age, the members of Yaupon Holly are arguably inspired by the more-recent wave of garage-inhabiting rockers like Thee Oh Sees (whose ditty “The Dream” Yaupon Holly has covered). But through the kismet-lineage of obscurity, stumbling into the pummel of “No Aces” points to deep first-wave psych-derelicts like The Sound of Imker’s “Train of Doomsday” (1969) or 1972-era Stack Waddy.

To clarify the band’s message, “No Aces” includes lyrics like “Look up to the sky / and pray for my soul to keep / to hear only back nothing / but a damning bitter scream” that would make Werner Herzog give the band a floppy, desultory high five. Jaded locals thinking there is some kind of deficiency of rock derangement need look no further than the berserk six minutes that Yaupon Holly casually foisted upon the Jacksonville music scene.

More New Music

You can hear new tracks from Yaupon Holly, and music from local, regional, national and international artists on our music discovery station The Independent 89.9 HD4. And you can follow our Fresh Squeeze playlist on Spotify to stream all the best new music, updated every month.