Revolver Guide To SXSW 2013 - Thursday March 14TH.

AKRON/FAMILY

Party @ Red 7
Party - Austin Psych Fest presents LEVITATION @ Hotel Vegas

BLACK LIPS

Showcase @ Cedar Street Courtyard, set time 1:00 AM - 1:50 AM   

BLEEKER, ALEX & THE FREAKS

Party - KVRXPlosion @ Spider House Ballroom

DROP THE LIME

Showcase @ The Madison, set time 1:00 AM - 1:50 AM   

EVAPORATORS, THE

Party - Mint Records & Riot Act Media Day Party @ Cheer Up Charlie's

KEN MODE

Showcase - MetalSucks @ Dirty Dog Bar, set time 9:40 PM - 10:20 PM

MISSING MONUMENTS

Party - Slovenly Recordings @ Legendary White Swan

OBNOX

Party - Can't Stop the Bleeding Day Show @ Beerland
Party - Temporary Insanity Party @ Cherrywood Coffeehouse, set time 8:20 PM
Showcase - Blackout Booking @ Headhunters

SINKANE

Showcase @ Clive Bar, set time 10:00 PM - 10:40 PM

SPIDER BAGS

Party - Texas Jumpstart 6 @ Sidebar, set time 3:45 PM   

TIMMY'S ORGANISM

Showcase @ Metal & Lace, set time 12:00 AM - 12:40 AM

TV GHOST

Party - Get Bent presents @ Tillery Park

WILSON, RENNY

Party - Mint Records & Riot Act Media Day Party @ Cheer Up Charlie's

Black Lips Middle East Tour Documentary.

Revolver Guide To NYE 2012/13.

A number of Revolver bands will be playing "Auld Lang Syne" next Monday night / Tuesday morning. Here's a complete list of NYE events.

BROOKLYN, NY
Holy Ghost! - Brooklyn Bowl
Kid Congo  - Home Sweet Home

CHICAGO, IL
Bad Sports - Empty Bottle

DENVER, CO
Slim Cessna's Auto Club - Oriental Theater

NEW ORLEANS, LA
Black Lips - One Eyed Jacks
Leftover Crack - Siberia

NEW YORK
Com Truise - The Gramercy Theatre

PHILADELPHIA, PA
Purling Hiss - Johnny Brenda's

SAN DIEGO, CA
Drop the lime - Ivy Nightclub @ Andaz

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Fresh & Onlys - The Chapel
Pins Of Light - Hemlock Tavern
Vetiver with Howlin Rain - Cafe Du Nord

SEATTLE, WA
The Intelligence - Neumo's

TUCSON, AZ
Nobunny - The district (260 E congress)

AUSTRALIA
HOBART, TAS    
Sharon Van Etten - Falls Festival Marion Bay

Rev Bands Playing Bruise Cruise.

Amazingly enough quite a few Revolver bands will be part of the first Bruise Cruise happening February 25th through 28th 2011. In The Red and Goner recording artists performing include; The Black Lips, Vivian Girls, Strange Boys, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Quintron and Miss Pussycat. The cruise will include multiple concerts at sea, an island party in Nassau, Bahamas, open-bar cocktail parties, and a soul dance-off. Good times on the high seas.

Bruise Cruise - The Strange Boys from BRUISE CRUISE FEST on Vimeo.

Get To Know The Strange Boys Via Dusted.com

Every January Dusted runs their annual Destined series in which they select ten artists to watch over in the coming year. Second to last chosen for 2009 was In The Red's new signing The Strange Boys. Here's your chance to get to know the boys.

Dusted’s Nate Knaebel profiles the Austin garage band and Destined selection Strange Boys.
Destined: The Strange Boys

The Austin-via-Dallas based Strange Boys are a young garage rock act whose loose, somewhat rootsy approach to the style brings to mind the old Doug Sahm adage “you just can’t live in Texas / If you don’t have a lot of soul.” The Strange Boys blend Nuggets garage, punk, R&B, blues and country without getting pinned down by any one of those styles. It’s as if those terms are used only as vehicle to create a musical feeling rather than a particular genre.

Formed as a punk band by guitarist/singer/songwriter Ryan Sambol and drummer Matt Hammer while the two were only in 8th grade, the Strange Boys have actually been making recordings for almost as long. It was with their 2007 Nothing EP on Dusty Medical, however, that the band truly came into its own. Despite their age (the majority of the band is just barely past 21, with Sambol’s older brother Philip coming in at the comparatively ancient age of 25), the Strange Boys generate a creaky jangle that sounds like it should be coming from a collection of old souls rather than guys barely in their second decade of living. Yet the Strange Boys aren’t a bunch of outsider savants who happened upon their style accidentally. As devoted music listeners, the Boys have done their homework. “You listen to a New York Dolls record in high school. “Pills,” the rock & roll nurse. Then you hear the Bo Diddley version,” explains Sambol. “You go from New York City in the 1970s to Chicago in the 1950s. Then you find out what Bo was listening to in Chicago. You just keep going back and back. And the further back you go the more sincere you get.”

There is a notable authenticity to the group’s sound that presumably comes in part from an interest in the past, however, the Strange Boys aren’t exactly retro fetishists either. It was with the arrival of Greg Enlow to the band around 2006 that they began to see themselves in more of a current context. “Greg introduced us to a lot of new stuff. King Khan & BBQ, Greg Cartwright stuff… the Reigning Sound, Oblivians, Compulsive Gamblers. I didn’t know anything like that was going on as a songwriter,” says Sambol. “They all made me say, Oh shit! and feel a lot better about things. You don’t have to be in 1959 to do this.”

Sambol also notes the influence of the Black Lips. “We learned a lot from them,” he says. “A lot of bands around us took themselves so seriously. The problem is when the music comes off like it’s more important than it really is. You’d see the Black Lips playing and they were smiling. It changes the vibe of things when the musicians on stage look like they’re having fun.”

But where the Black Lips sound entirely of these times, marinating their retro tendencies with Gangsta Grillz swagger, the Strange Boys evoke a sound not unlike that heard on Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, or at least a younger garage punk version of that album. That’s not to say the Strange Boys recall the Old Weird America, or the new one for that matter, yet both the Strange Boys and Dylan (and the Band) work a similar kind of magic, the end result being a rock ‘n’ roll sound plucked from numerous influences yet utterly unto itself. In the case of the Strange Boys, however, the Nuggets box set replaces Harry Smith’s Anthology as a blue print.

While the band’s musical scholarship is undeniable, one would be wise to avoid pinpointing a particular influence. “A band can make a whole career out of sounding like Radiohead, and no one says anything,” Sambol points out. “But when a band tries to go through someone that’s maybe easier to poke at – the Kinks or Dylan – people desperately want to reference it.” Touché.

While Sambol noted that he one day hopes to outgrow any influences, the band’s official debut full-length, The Strange Boys and Girls Club, already finds the band standing solidly on its own. It’s the sound of high school dances stomped out on gymnasium floors long since abandoned; cold nights and warm whiskey; bad decisions and trouble. The jangling guitars are punctuated with strategic bursts of fuzz; the drums provide a laconic shuffling rhythm that pushes the band along just so without ever rushing things. Sambol’s strained bleat sounds simultaneously desperate and elated. The album’s recording history, however, is a somewhat tumultuous one, despite the album’s almost insouciant feel.

Jay Reatard, an early champion of the band who helped get them signed to In the Red Records after seeing them live, actually recorded the original version of the record. The final album, however, comprises recordings made in an abandon liquor store with collaborator Orville Neley, who also recorded the Nothing EP, in Denton, Texas. About the process of recording And Girls Club, Sambol says, “There was definitely a comfort level with Orville. By the time we went to Orville’s, the tracks were old. At Jay’s, the tracks were fresh and the clock was ticking.

“It’s difficult to go somewhere and record with someone, and just because two people like each other’s music that doesn’t mean it’s always very good when you put it together. But what it comes down to is, we didn’t give him good enough tracks. If we did the tracks the way we did at Orville’s, we could have had a great record.” But as Sambol notes, “Jay’s cool with it, he wants the best record. And for someone who records everything himself, he understands that someone else wants to do what they want to do.”

Regardless of who the band records with, much of the quality of the Strange Boys music can be attributed to their commitment to a sound and finding that sound in the most natural way. “It’s really about playing the way you want to be heard. There are plenty of studios where you can do anything in. There were things in my head that I wanted to hear. You can get in trouble in a studio that way. You want to hear something that’s impossible to get. You have to accept what you’re getting and make it sound unique. If you don’t play something cool, it’s not going to sound cool.”

By Nate Knaebel

Black Lips Tour India - No Shit!

As reported by Pitchfork today, the Black Lips are taking their rock show to the distant lands of South Asia this month.

Black Lips to Play India's Indie "American Idol"

You think Atlanta badasses Black Lips ever get, like, tired? Or sick? It sure doesn't seem like it. They seem to know the indie rock halo can be fleeting, so they're taking advantage of the spotlight. More power to 'em. Before they unleash their new album, 200 Million Thousand, on February 24, and head to Europe and the U.S. next month, the foursome are boosting their Where I've Been profile with a round of gigs in India. The trek includes three dates headlining Campus Rock Idols-- which is like "American Idol", except with Indian college bands instead of American pop tarts, and no Simon Cowell (that we know of). The ambitious travellers are making a concerted effort to hit less-than-typical locales nowadays-- drummer Joe Bradly recently told My Old Kentucky Blog, "As soon as Sir Richard Branson, the rebel billionaire, opens up his space shuttle thing, we want to be the first band to play in space." Take that, Bowie! Back to earth:

01-16 Mumbai, India - Festival of New Noise
01-17 Pune, India - Raga Lawns, North Koregoan Park (Campus Rock Idols)
01-23 Chennai, India - Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall (Campus Rock Idols)
01-24 Calcutta, India - The Park 01-25 Bangalore, India - BRV Grounds, KSCA (Campus Rock Idols)

Posted by Ryan Dombal on Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:15pm

Other upcoming (less exotic) tour destinations:
02/15 London, UK @ Islinton Academy (NME Awards)
02/16 Bristol, UK @ Fleece N Firkin
02/17 Glasgow, UK @ ABC 2
02/18 Manchester, UK @ Institute
02/19 Brighton, UK @ Audio
02/26 Birmingham, UK @ Bottletree
02/27 Atlanta, GA @ Variety Playhouse
03/04 Carrboro, NC @ Cat's Cradle
03/05 Washington, DC @ Black Cat
03/06 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda's
03/07 Cambridge, MA @ Middle East
03/09 New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
03/10 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
03/12 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom
03/13 Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick
03/14 Chicago, IL @ Logan Square Auditorium
03/15 Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall Ballroom
03/16 St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club
03/17 Omaha, NE @ Waiting Room
03/18 Lawrence, KS @ Bottleneck
03/20-21 Austin, TX @ SXSW
03/23 New Orleans, LA @ One Eyed Jacks
03/25 Tallahassee, FL @ Club Downunder
03/26 Tampa, FL @ Orpheum
03/27 Miami, FL @ Churchill's
03/28 Gainesville, FL @ Common Grounds
03/29 Jacksonville, FL @ Jack Rabbits
03/30 Orlando, FL @ The Social

Dusted Reviewed Black Time's Latest Album Today.

Dusted Reviews
Artist: Black Time
Album: Double Negative
Label: In the Red
Review date: Jan. 7, 2009

Black Time’s Double Negative, seemingly made on a broken mixer in a cave, sets a new standard for artfully shitty recording quality. A particularly wonderful moment comes in the song “The Days Are Too Long and the Nights Are Too Short.” As the song progresses, the blown-out drums sound less and less like drums, culminating in what ought to be a final drum-roll that instead sounds like a horrible accident, disrupting the song’s other elements. Actually, those drums might be a drum machine, but the recording is too stunningly bad to be able to know for sure. It must take a carefully honed aesthetic sensibility to come up with such confusion, such delightful cacophony.

Indeed, there are many fine bits on Double Negative, the third full-length from this London-based trio (plus friends). The mingling of Hamburger Mary and Lemmy Caution’s English-accented sing-shouts on “Six Feet Below” works appealingly, in a way oddly reminiscent of Huggy Bear. A few of the dirge-y screech-ups (“Scary People,” “Problems”) attain a surprising level of creepiness. The reverby U.K. D.I.Y.-style girl-and-organ-heavy slower jam “I’m Gonna Haunt You When I’m Gone” is a whistle waiting to happen.

Generally, though, one gets the sense that Black Time has good taste in raw three-chord music, and that their own work carefully sums up, without acceding, their influences. The nicknames, the sassy ‘60s-style album cover, the lyrics about skeletons and hauntings, the spoken-word social critique “A Boring Day for the Boredom Boys,” will all appeal to people who like the same bands as Black Time. Those fans – of the Country Teasers or the Gories or In the Red labelmates Black Lips, whose songwriting ability far surpasses Black Times’ – will probably appreciate this album. Black Time seem glad to alter just enough elements of the garage-punk formula so their songs are enjoyably familiar, rather than simply by-the-numbers.

By Talya Cooper

In The Red Label Profile In NME.