Revival

There are at least two bands known by the name "Revival".

1) Revival - 'Music By Al Basim' was released in 1979. According to the legend Al Basim was an Iranian artist who was executed. In fact Al Basim was Bulgarian. An interesting ethnic fusion album...

False starts, dead ends, broken cities, cross-country escapes – no hard feelings – and Revival is reborn in the sulking cold East Coast winter, 2005. Josh Read and Evan Berodt pick through the scrambled junkyard parts of a previous collaboration gone awry, find a dozen tracks worth triaging, and carry on in the same old way warrior-poets always manage: by ballad, by bombast, by any means necessary.

Riding back in on the Horses of War, recent-dead tangles with Canyon and Jay Farrar pushed like bodies out the rear door of memory, these are men on a mission – to assume the aching on behalf of all us sad sinners, to alight in the night for a moon they know is reachable. Open spaces aren’t wide enough, high and lonesome not sparse enough, even the rain not wet enough, for the sea-weary longshoremen of Revival.

April 2006, springtime, something shimmering, fuck the winter, feel the grass. Smoke signals out to Noel White, just up the river, who returns them with an echoing of drums, and an album, tall and strong, is crafted. The experiment explodes into the full dark of day at the studio of J. Robbins, somewhere in the run-down industrial districts between Baltimore and Washington, DC.

Other players stop, strain ears to air, look to the sky, feel the rhythm as much as hear it, drop what they’re doing, wander up the mountain to lend a hand, if only for a moment, a show, a song, a season. Mikal Evans’ harmonies dipping low as her hip-length mane, Hash Vyas’ loping bass lines as rock-solid as his hard-earned indie lineage, Brian Clancy’s four-string also on occasional loan from local legends Dawn of Man, Josh Wenk’s drums thundering through it all – Revival live and in the flesh is no less impressive.

At the hard human heart of it all, though, the songs of Josh Read. Steeped equally in the spirit of ancient folk, brawling saloon standards, DC’s postpunk revolutionaries, and the early vangard of pychedelic rock, Read’s songs are about the bones of America. Raw sexuality to desolate balladry, it’s all there – whispered on the wind, prospected from the phychic hills. That voice. The lonely troubadour. It bewitches you, lays you down soft, cracked and pleading, shoots you down hard in a shotgun barrage.

2) Latvian christian band "revival". It was founded in 2005, when it's members decided to get together to worship and praise the Lord and share their experience of life with Jesus.