When John-Mark Lapham realised David Stith’s voice was exactly what he needed to finish a piece of music he was working on, neither knew the collaboration would work so well that they’d go on to strike up a partnership, name it The Revival Hour after a groundbreaking American evangelist radio show of the 1930s, and dedicate most of the next two years to invest their music with all the rousing and intimate emotion that such a name warranted.
Both established names in their own right, The Revival Hour is something of a cult supergroup. Texan-born Lapham was the sounds-and-samples component of Manchester-based The Earlies, purveyors of a kaleidoscopic brand of folk-tronica, and one half of the much lauded The Late Cord along side vocalist/ fellow Texan Micah P Hinson. The Buffalo-born Stith, meanwhile, released an equally revered debut album, Heavy Ghost, in 2009 on Sufjan Steven’s Asthmatic Kitty label and he played keyboards and sung backing vocals in Stevens’ global-trotting band last year.
The debut full length release from The Revival Hour is Scorpio Little Devil which sees the pair introducing a extraordinary fusion of panoramic timeless sounds with a thoroughly modernist feel: soul, doo-wop and pop, fused together by a panoply of electronics and Stith’s heavenly singing.
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