Blackfire Revelation: Blackfire Revelation – new album

New Orleans' blackened blues-metallers', BLACKFIRE REVELATION, self-titled album can be currently streamed in its bluesy entirety right here at AOL Music. The long-delayed, self-titled debut album  was released on July 5th, 2011 via the (nearly one-man) band founder J.R. Fields' Southern Reconstruction label. This digital-only release is available for purchase through iTunes, Amazon MP3, eMusic, MySpace Music, Napster, and the Zune Market Place. Below you’ll find the album's opening track, ‘Flood’, as well as BLACKFIRE REVELATION 2005's EP ‘Gold And Guns on 51’. Visit the band's SoundCloud page for more music and free downloads.

He with a “live like a snake - die like a bull” life-purpose, J.R. Fields, founded BLACKFIRE REVELATION in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2002. “Fields was in film school at the University of New Orleans at the time,” reads the official bio as written by Mark Hiram, “and growing increasingly disinterested in both college and the film industry. Later that year his grandfather, a farmer and Baptist deacon from Mississippi, passed away and left him an inheritance of $5000 dollars. He used the money “wisely” and dropped out of college, bought two half stacks, a drum set, and rented a rehearsal space. He put the word out to friends that he was looking for a drummer and soon met drummer R.K. “Hank” Haney through a former classmate. The duo began rehearsing and were soon gigging around New Orleans and throughout the southeast.” In 2004 the duo entered producer Jerry Teel's Funhouse South studio in New Orleans and recorded their debut EP entitled ‘Gold And Guns On 51’: “The five-song EP sounds exactly as if the boys are blaring away on a sweaty stage somewhere. The tunes are heavy and murky, which will serve as a doom metallist's dream. Included are three originals, including the album-opening standout, ‘Battle Hymn’, as well as a pair of curious covers, and BLUE CHEER ‘Second Time Around’- the latter of which includes a cameo from former WHITE ZOMBIE bassist and major BLACKFIRE REVELATION supporter Sean Yseult. As proven throughout ‘Gold And Guns On 51’, nothing beats the sound of a band playing live together - something the majority of “Pro Tools bands” should take note of,” writes about the release AllMusic's Greg Prato. The EP was licensed to Fat Possum Records through Fields' own Southern Reconstruction label and was released in the U.S. in March of 2005. While on the road supporting the record, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans leaving the future of the band and its hometown uncertain. Unable to return home, the band had spent the next several months picking up gigs where they could, to earn cash and stay afloat. In 2006, Fields and Haney enlisted producer Grant Curry and began recording their debut LP at his Fugitive Sound studio in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. With the record mixed, mastered and completed, Fields had put the band on indefinite hiatus. Five years later and with the record finally out, Fields insists that the BLACKFIRE REVELATION is not over and refers to his absence from music as “merely a pro-longed sabbatical”.

Flood – courtesy of BLACKFIRE REVELATION

Gold And Guns On 51 – courtesy of BLACKFIRE REVELATION