Slinking through the shadows from a misty, musty backstreet comes a mysterious band masterminded by a figure with a hood like an executioner's cap, who keeps in the back alley barking orders like some villain from Scooby-Doo. They are The(e) American Revolution, and Robert Schneider is not the leader, only an underling. Guessing the identity of the true captain is becoming an underground indie-rock parlor game.

"...The(e) American Revolution is a band of whom the mastermind is an older musician, we are just doing his bidding!!" writes Robert. "(I cannot say yet but he is British, is NOT Andy Partridge, and is NOT affiliated with Elephant 6)."

The band has performed live in Lexington, and has released one track so far, "Subscriptions to Magazines," which appears on the online compilation Know Your Own Vol. 2. About that song, Robert wrote in the OA interview: "[It was finished] in no more than thirty minutes from the time we picked up our instruments--we wrote the song, recorded it and mixed it like kids tumbling down a hill! And it rocks in such a raw pure way and is also really catchy, and sloppy and flawed and tossed-off--which of course you can hear in the recording, and is what makes it awesome! We didn't even notice the main riff is a rip-off of 'Smoke on the Water' until after it was mixed!" Listening to the track, all those qualities are readily apparent. It's rougher than anything on the deliberately-rough Apples in Stereo album Velocity of Sound. It's pure Nuggets garage rock, as though Robert and his cohort, brother-in-law Craig Morris from Lexington's the Ideal Free Distribution, are deliberately aiming for something a 16-year old midwestern American kid in 1966 might attempt after listening to the Who on the radio for the first time. To polish ain't the point.

But so far, the only track that's really surfaced is the one song, which--if you download it online--is interrupted by noise caused by an encoding error, as though the band rocked so hard they broke the MP3. (Robert writes that the line between rock and noise is "almost nonexistent anyway, with Th(e) American Revolution.") A better-sounding version is out there, and might be online soon.

UPDATE: Samantha and Craig from the Ideal Free Distribution have provided a flawless version of the song, which you can download here.

There's also a bit of confusion over the spelling of the band's name. Is it "Thee American Revolution," or "The American Revolution?" Both spellings have been tossed around online. There's really no answer, yet. "We have not officially decided between 'thee' and 'the,'" Robert writes Optical Atlas. "Actually it is going to say 'the' on our Buddha Electrostorm EP which will be coming out sometime on Bi-Fi Records so I guess it is only one 'e,' but my guess is we will flip-flop continually on the issue, depending on if we feel more psych or more garage on a given day." Certainly "Thee" hearkens back to the labored Olde-English flavor to which many 60's psych-pop bands strove, if they weren't emulating the Victorian age or the Old West (or Middle Earth, for that matter).

While the guessing game over the band's mastermind (and what role he plays) continues, Robert's written in with a new development--they've launched their official webpage. And so far, it answers no questions whatsoever. Surely it's only a coincidence that their press release for the page was sent out on April Fool's Day. Surely.

Keep checking that website, as well as Bi-Fi records, for updates on their upcoming EP Buddha Electrostorm. And thanks to Robert for helping Optical Atlas piece this puzzle together. Or apart.