What Fat Possum and South by Southwest Did for Colour Revolt

By Caren Kelleher

Photos by Danny Klimetz

It is an abnormally hot day in Austin, Texas. Despite the unforgiving afternoon sun, there is a steady stream of people flowing out to the back patio of the Volume Night Club. Colour Revolt has just finished its set at the Paste + Stereogum DELL Lounge at South By Southwest and its members are milling around in the company of Nada Surf and Destroyer. While his bandmates are talking to friends and fellow musicians, guitarist Jimmy Cajoles is sitting at a high-top table and admits (through a wide smile) that he is “tired as hell.” It is the second day of SXSW and Colour Revolt has already played four shows, including one in Houston the night before.

“South by Southwest is huge and overwhelming,” says Cajoles, still smiling. “Everybody looks like a rockstar. Everybody looks cooler than me.” In fact, Colour Revolt is hard to pick out in a crowd — five unassuming college students from Oxford, Miss., apt to discuss Big Macs and Barry Hannah in the same conversation.

Though the band shares a record label with Andrew Bird and Dinosaur Jr., it lacks the costume, attitude and notoriety that a number of bands rely on to stand out at SXSW, a festival that has lately been criticized for jumping the shark. Nearly 1,600 bands descended upon Austin for this year’s festival, each given the opportunity to play one official showcase. For bands like Colour Revolt, the excess of unofficial day parties (publicly scorned by SXSW) provides additional chances to make an impression with industry executives. As bassist Patrick Addison explains, “We definitely want respectable, great opportunities that will help us in the future. We were really willing to play anything and what we got ended up being really awesome shows,” including other day parties thrown by Urban Outfitters and the popular blog, Brooklyn Vegan. Invitations to perform at these parties serve as endorsements for a band that makes an impression with its intense, wailing and manic live performances, which are somewhat ugly even in the most harmonious moments. It is these shows that help distinguish the band from the thousands of others in the mix.

“Even at SXSW there are guys from Brooklyn playing southern rock, and its fine and it sounds good,” explains Cajoleas. “But it is not just referencing John Henry. It’s the reverence in which you do it. It’s the slow and meandering way the rhythms go. There’s a poetic nuance to the way that southerners speak and write and play music that nowhere else in the country has.”

In between coursework at the University of Mississippi and a demanding tour schedule (including upcoming tours with The Breeders and Snowden) Colour Revolt is at SXSW to find new business opportunities and support its first full-length album, Plunder, Beg, and Curse. With three more days of festivities looming, the verdict is still out on what SXSW 2008 will do for Colour Revolt.

Just one year ago, the band was in a less enviable position. A truly DIY act, Colour Revolt lacked a professional manager, publicity team and record deal as it went into its first SXSW experience. While on route to the festival all of the band’s gear was stolen, leaving them dependent on the charity of other artists to get through the festival.

“People were just hoping we’d complete each performance, move on to the next one and finish it,” reflects vocalist/guitarist Sean Kirkpatrick. “That was the goal of the last one: just get ‘em all done.”

Unfortunately, Colour Revolt is no stranger to setbacks, particularly because of its heritage. Kirkpatrick reasons, “If you’re in Mississippi, you have a great disadvantage trying to make it as a band — a lack of resources, if you will. Everything that’s done in Mississippi is almost done for everybody’s recreation without any expectation of it going out of the state because you just don’t feel it’s really possible.”

Yet the band’s story is completely tied to Mississippi. In 2004 its three original members — Cajoles, lead vocalist/guitarist Jesse Coppenbarger and drummer Len Clark — started playing as Fletcher in Jackson, Miss. The band received booking and management assistance from friend Palmer Houchins, who had been putting on all-ages shows in Jackson.

“I think we were allowed to be a little bit behind the times as far as what was cool,” allows Cajoles. “I first heard Nirvana [in 1996] and I remember when I found out that Kurt Cobain was dead. I was heartbroken. I missed everything. But that allowed us to musically develop in our own way.”

While working at a record store in Jackson, Cajoles struck up a friendship with lawyer Chaney Nichols who was hooked on Fletcher after seeing the band’s live performance. Nichols took the band under his wing when he formed the label Esperenza Plantation. In 2005, the band underwent a significant transition in sound and membership when Kirkpatrick joined the mix, prompting a name change to Colour Revolt (borrowed from Edwin Abbot’s 1884 social commentary, Flatland). “I was always a fan of their mathy, agro, time-signature changing sound,” says Nichols. “But from the first notes of [Colour Revolt’s early recording] ‘Mattresses Underwater,’ you could immediately tell this was something different.”

Hurricane Katrina derailed initial recording plans in 2005, so Colour Revolt took up artistic residence in Nichols’ house and produced its first EP. Addison then joined the mix and the disc made its way to Tiny Evil (an imprint of Interscope Records), which provided national distribution. With the support of its booking agents at Ellis Industries, the band juggled academics with weekend gigs. Cajoleas estimates the band has played 150 shows while still in school. “I learned how to write 10-page papers by hand while we drove home at 3 a.m.,” he recalls.

The early shows, including tours with Brand New, Manchester Orchestra and other “friend-bands,” helped Colour Revolt build a strong fan base despite musical differences with those bands. With these experiences under its belt, Colour Revolt began writing songs for its first full-length release, produced by Clay Jones (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello). At Jones’ suggestion, the band brought its demo to Oxford’s own Fat Possum, which later signed the band.

“Fat Possum was the one we wanted, straight up,” says Cajoleas. “They put out a lot of my favorite records. We trust them. I love the way they do business.”

Kirkpatrick cites that the label’s motto, “We’re trying our best,” is a perfect fit given the disadvantages of being in Mississippi. Any relative success that Colour Revolt enjoys while on the label, he says, “would say something great about the artistic nature of the state,” one deeply entrenched in a history of racial, social and religious conflict.

“I get scared going into the Faulkner, ‘I am Mississippi, Mississippi is me,’ kind of thing,” says Cajoleas. “But there’s a huge amount of conflict from the crime and the insanity of White Flight. You eventually realize that the way things are in a lot of ways is because your ancestors screwed up really badly and made horrible choices. In Oxford you have, within a quarter mile, a Confederate war monument and a civil rights monument. And it’s not that those are at odds with each other at all: its just reconciling two radically different histories and trying to grow and progress but still maintain a regional identity. The more I travel the country, the more I realize that everywhere else is shockingly the same. The South isn’t like that. I don’t want it to become that. At the same time, there are a lot of things that need to change. I would never say it is without its problems, because, my God, it has so many problems.”

Perhaps this lends itself to the existential push-and-pull that Colour Revolt confronts in its multi-dimensional soundscapes. Even in describing the highs and lows of the music, Kirkpatrick has to physically demonstrate the dynamic using his hands. “Every show kind of feels like a struggle. It’s like, ‘What are we doing? What is our existence about?’ and I feel there are a lot of people who can identify with that. We’re not trying to follow the God vs. man trend; it’s just a very honest record.

“Now I know there’s a lot of people who get sick and tired of that,” he continues. “There are a lot of themes that don’t really make sense when you read them, but that’s another thing about our record — it takes time to understand.”

Three weeks after SXSW, the band is back in Oxford, where everything operates at what Cajoleas describes as an “astoundingly lazy” pace. Though Cajoleas has graduated, his four bandmates are still balancing academics with a music career. The day before, Plunder, Beg and Curse was released nationally and reviews are starting to pour in. Addison and Kirkpatrick laugh in unison at the mention of this.

“Our university’s publication, The Daily Mississippian, did a little review of our record and put Brand New as the face of this new record,” Addison chuckles.

“That’s just how closely they associate us with that band,” says Kirkpatrick.

Addison adds, “You know that they just Google image searched us and I’m sure a Brand New picture popped up from a tour, and they went, “Oh! That must be them!’”

Kirkpatrick chimes in, saying, “People are really confused about what we look like and which band we are...”

“Which may be a good thing,” interrupts Addison.

Elusive though it may be, Colour Revolt is starting to see good results from its outing to SXSW.

“It was hard for people to invest anything in us in 2007 because they knew we had another year of school,” says Kirkpatrick. “This SXSW was about letting everyone know we were about to become a full-time band.”

While in Austin, the band lined up an Australian distributor for its record. The record will also receive proper distribution in Great Britain, with press support behind it. At press time, the band is still searching for a manager and more opportunities abroad.

“It’s an industry festival, and that’s the biggest complaint from most bands,” Kirkpatrick explains. “You’re playing to these people who are going to give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and make simple judgments — based on one show — on whether they want to work with you.”

Addison adds, “We might notice more down the road when the [European] promoters say, ‘Yeah, we remember you guys from SXSW,’ but not right now.”

Though Colour Revolt might not notice it, people are in fact starting to take interest in the band and discuss it on the web. In the 30 days following SXSW 2008, Colour Revolt had four times as many blog mentions as it did over the same timeframe last year. The band also received more blog attention in the month following SXSW than in December, January and February combined — no doubt helped by its record release with Fat Possum and the accompanying promotion. Tours with The Breeders and Snowden should also increase the band’s profile with new mature audiences.

Not that every audience will appreciate Colour Revolt immediately. “You always have to take time with our records to understand them,” says Kirkpatrick. “A one- or two-time listen? You’re not going to understand what’s going on. I can promise you that.”

Yet the band members are hesitant to over-explain Coppenbarger’s lyrics. Kirkpatrick and Addison consult briefly with one another, questioning whether to offer their personal interpretations of the album, including “Naked and Red,” in which Eden is re-imagined. Kirkpatrick does not go into much detail. “It feels like the best way to express your frustration with your existence as a person is through music,” he says.

Such frustration could explain the band’s attraction to the idea of the Colour Revolt in Flatland, which, as Kirkpatrick explains, gave everyone a common class. “No one was at a disadvantage,” he continues. “Everybody had equal opportunity to show who they were without being judged by what they were.”

As it is, this young band is being judged: by critics, fans and potential business partners. Colour Revolt seems unaffected by this pressure and instead plugs away humbly and deliberately while wrestling with demons and divinity on stage. But so long as entities like SXSW exist and there is support to be had from players like Fat Possum, Colour Revolt will have ample opportunity to prove itself until there is no mistaking its identity.

www.myspace.com/colourrevolt