“Alternative garage-rock stu ff” is selling the aptly named RevoltRevolt way too short
Idaho-based RevoltRevolt’s new EP is called Wild Unraveling, and in a large way, the title is a reference to singer/guitarist/keyboardist Chris Böck’s love of the outdoors, his relationship to the simplicity of the natural terrain proximal to his lifelong Boise home, and the freedom nature a ffords in letting oneself go. It’s also a reference to the quartet’s incorporation of “garage drones, hard rock, industrial noise, opera and space music” into a sound that even has its founding member stumbling when MAGNET asks about classi- fication and categorization.
“Um … I guess it’s rock,” Böck says between pregnant pauses and tittering laughter. “I don’t know. I’ve heard us called garage rock, space rock, even punk. I’ve asked myself this as well in thinking who we’d be best billed with, and I think it crosses over between di fferent styles. I don’t know … ‘alternative garage-rock stu ff’ … maybe? The interesting part, and one of the parts I like most about playing music, is songwriting. For us, it’s about the balance, what you can capture in the span of a song, how you can have it complement each part, and doing what’s best for the song.”
Beginning as a solo artist in 2007, Böck originally hooked up with a drummer friend, and the duo recorded and road-dogged until the decision was made to fill out the lineup with bassist Jacob Fredrickson, second guitarist Mike Muir, and Ben Wieland replacing the original tub-thumper. Böck describes this fl eshed-out confi guration of RevoltRevolt as possessing “more depth. All of the musicians are well-versed, which makes us more dynamic and diverse. When we were a two-piece, it was pretty straightforward. I feel we’re right where I’d like to be, and without the time constraints with this record like we had with previous recordings, it allowed us to try things I’d really wanted to do.”
Including the fusion of seemingly disparate elements and surprising one another in the studio?
“Well, I heard an opera singer in my head for one of the songs,” he says. “It was ‘Never Fade,’ the last track, which evolved after we hung on the last note of the song before it. After we did it, I could totally hear an opera singer, and the other guys were like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘Just bear with me,’ and when we found the singer (Emma Doupé), that was totally it!”
—Kevin Stewart-Panko
