Just discovered this intriguining 2007 LP when I was going through the RRRecords catalog recently, and for some reason had totally missed this when it originally came out. It's the latest LP release from Clang Quartet, actually a solo project from the self-styled "Christian noise" artist Scotty Irving, who some of you might know from his collaborations with avant-guitarist Eugene Chadbourne or as the drummer for the early-90's Greensboro, NC math rock band Geezer Lake. Yes, Irving is an affirmed Christian, and Clang Quartet is his peculiar outlet for expressing his evangelical beliefs through a medium of brutally loud improvised noise and freeform percussion. This combination of ideas is a strange one, but even though I normally have a real aversion to Christian thought finding it's way into extreme music, there's something fascinating about what Irving is doing. After I first listened to Revival Of The Wretch, I checked out a 2001 documentary short called Armor Of God that was made about Scotty Irving and his Clang Quartet (which you can see online at http://www.cinevegas.com/shorts/?p=46 ), which is a fascinating look at someone working within the noise/industrial/improv spectrum but with a philosophy behind his art that is completely outside of the norm for this particular musical culture. The documentary shows Clang Quartet as being almost like performance art for live performances, with spoken word material and oddball costumes making up much of the set along with the more pummeling sonic elements, but on record, it's pretty heavy. Revival is part harsh noise eruption, part free-improv percussion, and Irving's formidible abilities as a drummer push this into some really wild territory, like hearing an avant-jazz percussionist blasting through gouged openings in walls of violent Neubauten-esque metalscrape and deafening electronic screech. Equally formidible is the homebuilt instrument that Irving created called "the Crutch", which is almost exactly that, except what was once an ordinary crutch has been clustered with barnacle-like growths of effects pedals, metal springs, plates, cables, and other materials, turning it a nightmare object that looks like it just escaped from Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Irving uses this monstrosity to create massive amplified blasts of noise, and any noisician that sees this in action in Armor Of God or at a live Clang Quartet show is probably going to be green with envy. The evangelical rants that appeared on older Clang Quartet releases are absent here, making this record more accessible to noise fans who might have found the 2002 album The Separation of Church & Hate harder to swallow, but those elements can still be found here in the insert sheet, which directs the listener to look at John 3:1-21 in the Bible for the background concept behind this two-part recorded piece. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend taking a look at the Armor Of God documentary first to see what this is about, and then explore Clang Quartet's sounds from there. Definitely unlike anything I've come across in the contempo free-noise scene. Limited to 200 copies, in a black blank LP jacket with pasted-on artwork.