For three years, music industry executives have agreed that Roman Candle is one of the best, most complete American rock bands to surface in a decade. Skip writes engrossingly vivid short stories in one verse, and Logan's rhythmic range--packing love for DJ Shadow, Radiohead and The Rolling Stones in one kit--turns Skip's scripts into moving pictures. Crawford gets Logan's rhythmic tendencies and meets them square on. Timshel's keyboard lines and Jaeger's guitar leads marry taste and technique. But for the past three years, their second album, The Wee Hours Revue, has been locked in a music industry stranglehold. At last, it's free.

The Wee Hours Revue is now available from V2 Records, the New York-based label founded by Virgin Records president Richard Branson after he sold out to EMI in 1992. Their labelmates will include The White Stripes, Rickie Lee Jones and Gang of Four. As independent record companies go, this is a big deal, and it could make the band very famous. After all, Roman Candle is better at what they do--writing imaginative pop songs and building them into captivating four-minute Southern-air epics with the unleashed spirit of The Replacements and unorthodox intuition of Wilco--than any other "band on the verge" in memory. Things could get very busy, very soon.