After the runaway success of “Wish I Knew You,” there was a question of whether the Revivalists would become superstars or one-hit wonders. Turns out they’ve done neither: they’ve gotten reasonably big with a music-hungry audience, intersecting somewhat with the jam-band world. And this is the kind of album you’d hope such a band would make: a set of solid songs that leave room for stretching out in concert.
As their first full album in five years, Pour it Out Into the Night has a few extra layers of studio polish, and the wall-of-sound approach is tastefully done: the opening “Kid” bursts out with orchestral keyboards, gospel choir and textural guitar, none of which overwhelms a strong and singable tune. “Don’t Look Back” finds the band rocking faster and louder than ever before; and they manage to segue from the technofied “Good Old Days” to the bluesy acoustic “Down in the Dirt” without missing a turn. Only “The Long Con” falls short, as a protest song that never gets specific on what it’s protesting—though multi-layered, its hip-hop arrangement is one of the more interesting ones here.
The surprise is the thoughtful, almost somber turn the album takes in its second half. David Shaw is no stranger to singing about self-doubt; but tracks like “Alive” and “Wait for the Sun” deal specifically with loss and grieving. Even the usual Revivalists optimism takes a backseat on “Say Goodbye,” a piano/strings ballad that looks back on a tender moment with a lost friend or lover. Shaw’s vocals here have a dramatic restraint that he might not have accessed in the old days. The title track has an anthemic chorus, but it’s delivered in a near-whisper, as Shaw sings about cradling his daughter while there are sirens out the window. The band is smart enough not to kick in and ruin the moment. It may not be a great career move for the Revivalists to release a relatively dark album at this point, but the empathy in these songs is clearly the more important thing.
—Brett Milano
New Orleans’s rock superstars, The Revivalists, are back with their first studio album since 2020 (Made in Muscle Shoals – EP). Entitled Pour It Out Into The Night, this is a 12-song full length album featuring four of their most recent singles, “Kid,” “The Long Con,” “Down In The Dirt,” and “Don’t Look Back.”
The Revivalists, headed by lead singer and guitarist David Shaw, stole hearts all across the world in 2015 with their breakout track “Wish I Knew You” from their third album, Men Amongst Mountains, and have been a staple of the modern rock scene ever since, releasing multiple studio albums and singles as well as playing music festivals all across the U.S., including New Orleans’ own Jazz Fest.
Pour It Out Into The Night is the group’s first full-length effort post-pandemic, and you can feel the emergent positivity in every song, as upbeat drums support summery chord progressions and optimistic lyricism. On the LP’s third track, Shaw paints a picture of someone finally living without inhibitions, evoking a sense of nostalgia from his audience for a memory that may not even exist, but we wish it did. He sings, “These are the good old days, these are the good old/ Passing through, passing out, dancing in the kitchen while neighbors shout.” On the opening track, “Kid,” the instrumentation is eerily reminiscent of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros hit “40 Day Dream,” but in a way that pays homage rather than imitates, and Shaw belts an undeniable earworm of a hook that will stick in the minds of listeners for the rest of the summer and beyond: “Hey, kid, just sing the songs that wake the dead.”
With this LP, Shaw and The Revivalists have put together a collection of catchy, inspiring tracks which will be hard to escape as listeners all across the country use it as the soundtrack to their summers.
—Owen Baekey
