There are many things to love about Low being on the road again, but increasingly one of the joys of the Minnesota trio’s re-emergence is the simultaneous kicking into gear of frontman Alan Sparhawk’s other band, Retribution Gospel Choir. The side project has released two excellent albums thus far consisting of heavier, rockier takes on admittedly quite Low-like numbers that suggested at various points that, despite the continuing brilliance of his prime concern of a band, he might actually be having more plain old fun in Retribution Gospel Choir than he was in Low.

And especially compared to the heavy themes of nigh-on every Low song, the RGC do sound like a total riot. This all-too-short EP (a mere ten minutes) mightn’t pack the emotional weight of 2010’s excellent full-length 2, but it does offer a highly entertaining insight in to what would have happened if Sparhawk had have been a member of Crazy Horse or Kiss (honest, ‘Maharisha’ sounds like Kiss) rather than a really quiet band with his wife.

Fun isn’t a word that springs instantly to mind when thinking of the work of Alan Sparhawk, but it’s essential to making The Revolution EP a success. It might even sound a little clichéd if delivered with anything other than a grin on one’s face, and lines like “Crank up the bass and give me some treble – I wanna feel it now!” in opener ‘Feel It, Superior’ certainly do tread that fine line. But, it’s a total success. The closing hand-claps and calls to revolution of ‘The Stone (Revolution)’ similarly deal with some pretty hackneyed rock and roll themes (“You want a revolution, let’s start a revolution!”), but remember that political uprising is actually a theme with which Sparhawk has been wrestling a fair amount on recent Low albums – here, he’s just doing so whilst pretending to be The Boss instead of elegantly cooing to his wife.

The best thing here is ‘I’m A Man’, which despite being less than two minutes long is made of significant substance, and hints at a hopefully not too distant album exploring some of the more downtrodden, sonically abrasive themes this splendid track touches on. It’s symptomatic, though, of the only problem with The Revolution EP : there just simply isn’t enough of it.