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Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome back to Northwest Music Month 2016, where we’re featuring a different local band or artist for your music discovering pleasure every day during the month of June, to help ring in a summer of local music. Some days these artists could be a regional favorite that’s already got a following, and other days they could be a complete unknown that you’ve never heard of. Today’s band is a delightful local indie rock underdog we’ve championed before on this site, one Uncle Sugar.
Hailing from the somewhat obscure Poulsbo, Washington, Uncle Sugar is an up-and-coming rock outfit spearheaded by singer-songwriter Greg Warns, with a unique array of influences. On one hand, the outfit sound takes on a home-recorded, DIY indie rock sound like you’d expect from many independent acts on this local level. But on another hand, the band’s sound feels indebted to way more than just the lo-fi indie pioneers of old. Listening to the band’s music, you can definitely pick up an influence from garage rock in a lot of the heavier-hitting songs, and on a handful of moments on the record, you can hear brief flourishes of drum machine programming, like you might hear from bands like Modest Mouse.
In March of this year, Uncle Sugar released their debut full-length album, Hourglass, which, although it sadly flew under the radar of many local rock fans, the record is a promising start for the solo project. While the album is tight and interesting musically, a huge selling point is its lyrical content and vocals. In our review of the LP, we praised the album, saying that the album, “sees Greg (who wrote, played, sang, engineered, and produced everything on the record, save for the four drum tracks previously mentioned) playing his heart out with dazzling effect,” also noting that Hourglass is a record “with a spare yet rich sound tapestry to a very professional and highly listenable effect.”
If you’ve never heard of Uncle Sugar, we highly recommend rectifying that. You won’t find many others around here that are as bold and interesting as this band has proven themselves to be with such a short back-catalog. Let’s hope this project drops more music in the near future.
In the meantime, you can find Uncle Sugar on Facebook and Bandcamp, and stream Hourglass below.
If you would like to have your band submitted for a chance to be featured in this segment, consult this link for more information on how you can do so. Submissions for Northwest Music Month will be taken until this Sunday, June 19th, so make sure to get your submission in soon.
