“Hi, Andy.
Hope all is good
I thought you might enjoy this band”
The type of email you get about 100 times a week when you run a music website.
Spoiler alert: Dear Reader, 99% of the time, you don’t.
However, in the case of The Midnight Revival, welcome to the 1%.
An absolute beauty of an alt-country record, the voice that Adam Sizemore possesses could only play in a roots rock n roll band, and when he sings “If you don’t like the way I’m living then why did you make it feel so good?” on the opening song, “Feels So Good”, you are left wondering how this is only their debut record.
The answer is that they’ve all done about a million things, and all that experience is right there, front and centre on “Say Goodbye” which is as if Son Volt, Whiskeytown, and whoever the hell else have reformed.
“This Heart” is the sort of thing that Jason Isbell nails down, and Chris Bragg – who formed the band with Sizemore – finds a perfect guitar sound.
What they’ve done so well is surround themselves with so much experience. You’ll be thinking that songs like “New Orleans” are already hits, so gloriously familiar are they, the harmonies alone are worth staying for.
“Runaway” changes pace and initially sounds almost fragile as it reflects, but with a band that includes people that have played with artists as diverse as Pink, Macy Gray and Kid Rock as well as Shooter and Waylon Jennings, its capable of going anywhere it damn well wants to.
That includes a brilliant cover of “Take It To The Limit” – at a fraction of the obscene cost of seeing the real Eagles in England this summer, more importantly, they’ve done something original with it. No mean feat with a classic.
It seems odd to sum up an album that I am going to spend 500 words talking about in one. But “class” would do. “Someone’s Gonna Cry” or “Hurt Every Time” are not new necessarily and not everything has to be cutting edge, does it? But they sound so fresh.
“Somewhere In Between” has a warmth, a laid-back quality, something close to Laurel Canyon if it was in the South and not the West, while the beauty of Bragg’s acoustics is at odds with the desperation of the words and tone of “Hanging On”, and the longest song that “…Revival” has, “Third Degree” in many ways ties all the loose ends up and is the album in microcosm, but that doesn’t stop “Roll The Dice” letting its hair down and having some truly filthy sounding slide guitar to go with a whole dollop of soul.
An absolutely glorious record, by music lifers who mean every word and have the skill to back it up.
It amounts to an all-you-can-eat buffet of Americana and associated sounds. The Great American Songbook deserves another page.
Rating 9/10
