Revelons ’77–’82 LP

You can’t help but feel a little bad for the REVELONS—if they’d released more than just a 45 during their six-year run, maybe they would have found the same level of success and critical appreciation as their Ork Records labelmates like TELEVISION and RICHARD HELL. We’ll never really know for sure, but the unreleased material gathered on ’77–’82 offers a pretty convincing glimpse into what could have been, with the REVELONS’ trinity of revved-up rock’n’roll, sneering (proto-)punk, and tough power pop beat playing out like a pile of cut-up and reassembled flyers from heyday-era CBGB and Max’s Kansas City gigs. Both sides of that lost-gem 1979 Ork single (“The Way (You Touch My Hand)” and “97 Tears”) are included here, hiccupping and strutting in an almost VOIDOIDS-esque manner, while “My Town” has all of the nervous new wave jitters of the TALKING HEADS without the art school pretensions, the wired post-VELVETS chug of “Red Hot Woman” casts the REVELONS as a more streetwise MODERN LOVERS, and if TELEVISION had ever covered ROKY ERICKSON’s “Two Headed Dog,” it probably would have sounded a lot like “A Children’s Story” (featuring TELEVISION’s Fred Smith on bass, no coincidence). The REVELONS never got their shot at making their own Blank Generation or Marquee Moon, but this lost-and-found collection does them proper justice—pure pop for punks.

• Reviewer Erika Elizabeth
• Label HoZac
• Issue MRR #476 • January 2023