home | revolver usa home | midheaven mailorder | the communion label | downloads | news | new releases | new release archive | tour dates | faq/links | our cats | privacy | contact | sitemap | |
 
Updated 3/3/01  VARIOUS ARTISTS Urban Revolutions (FUTURE PRIMITIVE FP005) CD/3xLP Released the week of February 12th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder The long awaited and eagerly anticipated compilation by the San Francisco-based Future Primitive Sound label tears down the usual find-a-loop-and-scratch-it-to-death formula that has plagued turntablist collections compiled by less refined ears. Instead, Urban Revolutions showcases the production acumen of a select few DJs who have solid compositional talent and arsenals of turntable skills. Tracks are structured into complete songs which focus on big beats and solid, head-nodding rhythms, adding just the right amount of turntable fire. This 78-minute monster [single CD, triple LP!] promises to set a new standard for DJ compilations, raising the stakes of things to come.
 ELECTRIC PRUNES Lost Dreams (BIRDMAN BMR22) CD Released the week of February 12th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder Between 1965 and 1969 Los Angeles' Electric Prunes recorded some of the best psychedelic/experimental/garage/punk of the era. The band is probably best remembered for their US hit "I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night," though they generated a staggering amount of stellar material for a band that existed for such a short period of time. This 23-track CD is the definitive collection by these '60s psychedelic legends. Only recently have their first two classic LPs been finally made available on CD by the Collectables label (taken from nth-generation tapes and mastered atrociously, unfortunately). Now, for the first time, the 'Prunes' finest moments have been captured on the digital format in pristine sound. Taken from original master tapes and painstakingly restored and mastered under the guidance of 'Prunes leader James Lowe, these recordings have never sounded better. Collecting the best tracks from the band's first two albums, ultra-rare singles sides, demos and a hilarious radio spot for Vox wah-wah pedals, this is the only release anyone will ever need by the Electric Prunes.
 FUCK Cupid's Cactus (SMELLS LIKE RECORDS SLR44) CD Released the week of February 12th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder After releasing two CDs on their own, two more through Matador, and a cottage industry's worth of singles and comp appearances, Fuck, the band, has come to SLR to release their latest full-length album, Cupid's Cactus. With stylistic nods to out-rock architects like Can and Meat Puppets, and a pop sense that owes as much to the Platters as the Pixies, the album hazily unfolds its majestic mojo in a 35-minute, 15-song serenade of soulful indie rock. The production boasts a bone-dry intimacy, and the performances - the twin-guitar click-and-drone, whispered vox, and unique hat-bass dances - make the band's best case yet for the supremacy of subtlety, space, and inspired song-sense within the rock idiom. From Oakland, Calfornia, Ted Ellison plays electric bass guitar, Tim Prudhomme rhythm guitar and harmonica, Geoff Soule electric lead guitar, Kyle Statham drums, and all four of the boys sing. Fuck, the band, also works piano, hammond organ, tambourine, mouth organ, Arabian bongos and claves into their act.
 KNOXVILLE GIRLS In A Paper Suit (IN THE RED ITR75) CD Released the week of February 26th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder In 1999 Jerry Teel (Honeymoon Killers, Chrome Cranks), Kid Congo Powers (The Cramps, Gun Club, Nick Cave's Bad Seeds), Bob Bert (Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore), Jack Martin (Little Porkchop) and Barry London came together and recorded and released their self-titled debut album. The Knoxville Girls lay down a raw blend of country/western, soul, rockabilly and blues as interpreted by their collective Lower East Side psyche. They've been described as "no wave country" and "a cross between Charlie Feathers and the Velvet Underground." They've toured extensively in the US and Europe to enthusiastic response. Bigger, louder and grittier than their debut, In A Paper Suit is an absolute rock'n'roll masterpiece. The Rolling Stones would pay good money to call this album their own.
 NOW TIME DELEGATIONWatch For Today (IN THE RED ITR76) CD Released the week of February 26th, 2001
order from Midheaven mailorder The NOW TIME DELEGATION were formed in the heart of Texas with the intent to make SOUL music the way it was intended to be made. Are you ready for real SOUL music? Then get ready for the NOW TIME DELEGATION! The NOW TIME DELEGATION have reared their heads to show everybody just how it's done. This band is fixing to take the kids to school Muscle Shoals-style and they're taking names and cleaning house along the way. The NOW TIME DELEGATION are the real article. This is genuine, unrefined, testifying SOUL music. This is the stuff to make you get ready, get sweaty, rock steady and get down and dirty. This is the sound of real SOUL music. The NOW TIME DELEGATION are fixin' to take it in every direction - they're playing northern SOUL, southern SOUL and even eastern and western SOUL. This stuff just has SOUL. You can get down and do the monkey to this stuff. You can get down and pray to this stuff. You can just GET DOWN to this stuff. This stuff is SOUL music. Don't be fooled by imitators - the Delegation are emancipators. The Delegation are about SOUL music. The time is NOW for SOUL music. We need SOUL music NOW. It is NOW TIME right NOW. It's time for everybody to give it up for SOUL music and give it up for the NOW TIME DELEGATION.
TIM KERR Guitar (formerly of Big Boys, Poison 13, Jack 'O Fire, Lord High Fixers)
LISA KEKELAU Vocals (currently of The Bellrays)
ALEX CUERVO Bass (formerly of Blacktop, currently of the Gospel Swingers)
DEBBIE JOHNSON Organ (currently of the Gospel Swingers)
STEVE THE GUY Drums (currently of the Gospel Swingers)
30-second RealAudio excerpts: Raise Your Hand
Released the week of February 12th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder Blind Dog have been crafting their sound for nearly six years in their home of Halmstad, Sweden, and have consistently stood out from their peers. The band's illustrious audiography began in 1996 with their appearance on the world's first-ever stoner-rock compilation, Roadrunner Records' Burn One Up: Music For Stoners, alongside scene pioneers Sleep, Fu Manchu, Cathedral, and Queens of the Stone Age. Widely regarded as one of the key albums that jump-started the now-blossoming stoner rock movement, Burn One Up acquainted the rock community with Blind Dog's combination of thunderous yet infectious riffery and dynamic vocals that utilize both pristine harmonies and occasional death-y scrapes. Their track from this long out-of-print cornerstone appears on this U.S. edition of the album. The band continued ahead slowly, releasing a seven-inch in 1998 on Germany's Warpburner Records, and began work on their first album the following year.
Blind Dog's sound reflects a wide range of influences beyond the traditional stoner fare. Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd spring immediately to mind upon hearing The Last Adventures of Captain Dog, not in the music so much as in the approach to the album as a single piece of art; a soundscape characterized by peaks and valleys, building tensions and explosive releases. Musically, the band are masters of the up-tempo, downtuned musical piledriver a la The Mushroom River Band or Fu ManchuÉ but with the appearance of instruments like harmonica and hammond organ, or forays into a few spare, narcotic numbers, Blind Dog prove they don't need the crutches that speed and distortion supply, upon which so many bands in this scene feel no qualms about relying. Every sound is a calculated endeavor, bringing together The Last Adventures as the first heavy-groove masterpiece of 2001.
30-second RealAudio excerpts: Thundergroove
Released the week of February 26th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder
The Blue Law is the much-anticipated third full-length release by a quartet which began as a deceptively simple pop trio with the uncanny ability to hit as many emotional chords as musical ones, and has evolved into a subtly sophisticated pop group that now hits those chords with an articulate precision. Silver Scooter uses the studio as a tool to silken, not slicken, a tasteful sound that was already tight, controlled, and in many ways, perfect. Under the wellgroomed coiffure of their new record breathes a beast.
Singer/guitarist Scott Garred tells us in perfect pitch about the urge to smash his car into an old lover's fender (that unwitting ex-lover might even be singing along). New guitarist Shawn Camp, who played bass with Scott and drummer Tom Hudson in their college band in the Pacific Northwest, painted the artwork on the cover of Silver Scooter's first album, The Other Palm Springs, as well as the cover of The Blue Law. John Hunt's bass lines rumble with a nearly unperceived menace. And, in the midst of a groove so steady it defies metronomes, seemlingly random guitar lines careen in and out of control, as if the guitar was played by two people instead of one.
In fact, that guitar was actually played by two people in one case. Scott wrestled for control of a Gibson Les Paul with longtime producer Dave McNair during the taping of "Terrorism Lover." Likewise, Silver Scooter recorded much of The Blue Law in such a grab-bag fashion, using what most bands call finished songs as mere starting points. Not surprisingly, it works well, and The Blue Law might not only be Silver Scooter's best album to date, but also its most touching, dense, and rewarding. This album realizes the promise of Orleans Parish and will surely entrench itself in record collections everywhere as the album that never leaves, no matter how many times it says, "Goodbye."
30-second RealAudio excerpts: Goodbye
Released the week of February 26th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder
If it wasn't evident enough on 1999's trashy and glamorous Goodbye Private Life, The Kiss Offs don't just love rock and roll, they have a destructive, co-dependent relationship with the genre and feel compelled to sing about it whenever possible. Rock Bottom is about, for, and because of rock. It directly addresses what it has done to their otherwise mundane middle class lives - they're poor, they're unemployed, they're dirty, they're continuously intoxicated, they're willfully destructive and they often sleep on floors, despite the fact that each is somewhat educated and comes from a good, loving family.
"Prolonged Adolescence" captures the drunken nights roaming Austin on old bikes with friends to cheer on local bands. "Love You Hardcore" is about missing those bands when they inevitably break up and missing those friends when they leave. "The Freedom of Rock" and "Pleather Pantz" expound on the redemptive, disfiguring, and humbling power of rock and roll. "Broken Fingers for Talented Singers" is a meta-rock doctrine, a shout-out to rock fans everywhere with lines like, "So you can't sing, then scream and shout," and "Three chords are great, but one will do." Another verse grants license to rip off influences - then blatantly cops a few lines from The Fall's "Copped It," a song about plagiarism no less, after declaring such robberies "the building 'Brix' of a 'Mark E.' (marquee) career."
Other songs revert to the tried-and-true Kiss Offs' topics such as love, sex and, of course, kissing. As usual, the guitars skronk and spurt, the bass rumbles and belches, the drums pound like a polyrhythmic migraine, and the keyboards... sound pretty good, considering they use a Casio bought on sale at Sam's Club.
Along The Kiss Offs' well-worn tour route, the band is known for their beer-soaked live shows, which often include climbing on amps, tables and other obstacles. They've hurled guitars, drums and themselves at stages, roofs, the audience and each other on numerous occasions, and on others they simply hurled. They've set themselves and others on fire and have outstanding warrants in at least three states. They've ordered fast-food from drive-through windows on foot. And they hide their heads in shame when these exploits are mentioned, because rock made them do it.
Released the week of February 12th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder With so much outward-bound free action these days, it's oddly comforting to
hear someone's - well, Roy Montgomery's - version of the journey to the heart of the inner cosmos. A sister record to Montgomery's Drunken Fish CD
The Allegory of Hearing, Silver Wheel Of Prayer has seven complementary instrumental
tracks, played mostly on Tiesco six-string and recorded mostly on
four-track. A couple of tracks are dominated by a new Farfisa organ, which
provides a gliding drone and waver on which to hang titles like "for the
disoriented" and "for the mortified." The longest track here is "for a
small blue orb," a simple strum that builds into a hypnotic pattern over 16
minutes.
"The album," says Roy, "is dedicated to Geoff Davies and Annie Leadbetter
and their son Jess, who, without seeming to worry about what they were in
for, welcomed me into their house and their lives at 12 Buckingham Ave,
Liverpool in 1982. The longest track on this recording was first sketched
out in their front room on a black Korean acoustic guitar which I
christened "Rosebud." It has taken way too long to finish the sketch and to
say thanks, but they really did feed my soul and I am grateful for it."
30-second RealAudio excerpts: For the Imperiled
Released the week of February 26th, 2001 order from Midheaven mailorder
Tokyo's premier power trio returns with their highly-anticipated, second full-length release. Three years ago, they stormed on to the extreme noise scene and quickly took it hostage with Power Violence Forever (their Slap A Ham debut). Endless Summer ensures that their brand of audio terrorism is still taking prisoners. This long-awaited platter maintains the F.O.B. tradition of delivering bombastic thrash attacks, but this time around their sound also pays homage to classic 1980s-style Japanese hardcore pioneered by the likes of Gauze, Lipcream, and Outo. Like an out-of- control bullet train, Fuck On The Beach barrels along with their trademark buzzsaw guitar, steamrolling bass, hyperkinetic drumming, and gut-wrenching vocals. The blistering assault of Endless Summer will have fans, as well as soon-to-be-converts, Super Gluing this onto their turntables and into their CD players for repeated listens!
Fuck on the Beach Click the titles below for details on specific new
releases.
February 2001 New Release index:
BLIND DOG
ELECTRIC PRUNES
FUCK
FUCK ON THE BEACH
THE KISS OFFS
KNOXVILLE GIRLS
ROY MONTGOMERY
NOW TIME DELEGATION
SILVER SCOOTER
VARIOUS ARTISTS
January 2002 new releases
(all dates subject to change)
BROTHER JT
CONSUMERS
LARSEN
HERSCHEL GORDON LEWIS
SWANS
ORNETTE COLEMAN
ALICE COLTRANE
BEN KUNIN
NOVEX
DON HOWLAND
INFINITE X's
L. STINKBUG
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
VIBRACATHEDRAL ORCHESTRA
SIMON WICKHAM-SMITH
AWOL ONE
ETERNAL ELYSIUM
TONY JOE WHITE
The releases above and on the left (as well as over 15,000 other
independent-label and import titles) can be purchased online at Midheaven Mailorder.
Revolver USA Distribution's umbrella shelters an extended and charmingly
dysfunctional family of manufactured / distributed labels. Most of these companies
handle their own publicity and promotion, some have their own websites,
and most have bustling, nearly-organized mailorder operations of their own.
Our exclusive label roster appears below in the form of links to our Midheaven mailorder database. We carry many, many other labels on a non-exclusive basis.
REVOLVER USA EXCLUSIVE LABELS and their merchandise can be browsed by clicking the links below: AMMP
Also consider paying a visit to our Midheaven
Jukebox. RealAudio-enabled users can hear over 1500
30-second song excerpts from releases by hundreds of artists, all
randomly arranged for our visitors who rely upon dependable
unpredictability from their RealAudio experience.
Want the inside track on developments at Revolver USA, Midheaven
mailorder and the Communion label? Me too. But we'll both have to
settle for midheaven.com's News page.
If you have a Frequently Asked Question you'd like to pose, check out
our FAQ first. We may
have an answer all prepared for you. Our exclusive label list can be
found there (and below), as well.
Occasionally bands affilliated with Revolver USA and its exclusive labels perform live. No, it's true. You can be in the same room with
these bands, but it involves leaving the house (life is full of
trade-offs, isn't it?). Keep up with Revolver USA-associated artists' in-the-flesh forays
by checking in with our tour dates
page.
Where can you find detailed webpages regarding the Communion label's
most recent releases? On the Communion label
homepage, claro que si. There you can browse every existing
release on the Communion label, listen to RealAudio samples,
download free MP3s, and zero in on recent (and otherwise) gorgeousness by
The Tower Recordings,
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282,
Village of Savoonga,
Alles Wie Gross,
Idyll Swords, Mia
Doi Todd and Barbara Manning. And don't forget to drop in on those Folk
Implosion pages.
We have also set aside three other very special pages for three other very special releases:
Bananafish 14
| |
BLIND DOG 
SILVER SCOOTER
KISS OFFS
ROY MONTGOMERY
FUCK ON THE BEACH
| home | revolver usa home | midheaven mailorder | the communion label | downloads | news | new releases | new release archive | tour dates | faq/links | our cats | privacy | contact | sitemap |