Evangelista – Prince of Truth

Constellation Records (2009)

Former Geraldine Fibbers vocalist Carla Bozulich released a fantastic album in 2006: Evangelista. It was evidently so good (along with the fact that she now had a band) that she released her next album, Hello, Voyager, under the Evangelista alias. That was one of the finest records of last year. Prince of Truth is the second Evangelista album – can it continue the run of excellence?

Short answer: yes. Bozulich is an otherworldly talent, and the players she has been working with for the last few years complement her perfectly. Hello, Voyager was a record of vast emotional diversity; it touched on the rain-spattered melancholy of Evangelista, but juxtaposed it with exuberant exhortation to the listener, defying categorisation. It translated, with seemingly matchless intensity, to the live setting. She pulls you into her personal underworld, strips herself and the audience emotionally naked, and makes you love it.

Prince of Truth is less extravagant, in the PT Barnum, big top, sense, but absolutely destroys on other levels. ‘You Are Jaguar’, for example, stirs up a bewildering whirlwind of intricate, lovely, noise. Unlike traditional noise-music, this isn’t a brew of distortion, drone and feedback, but an instrumental arrangement that brings to mind the best of Godspeed You! Black Emperor condensed into four minutes. This shouldn’t be too surprising: the album was recorded at Hotel 2 Tango in Montreal, with players including various Quebec post-rockers. But where, say, Silver Mt. Zion settles for so-so singing, the likes of Nadia Moss and Thierry Amar – as well as Tzadik collaborator Shahzad Ismaily – get to work with one of the finest vocalists around.

This is most obvious on the desolately exquisite ‘I Lay There In Front Of Me Covered In Ice’. There is organ, percussion, guitar and more, but it’s all merely aural mise-en-scène for Carla’s gentle duet with herself. While she can channel Hades through her body and out of her mouth in quite frightening fashion, she can also sing as gently, touchingly, as anyone. She sets a forbidding scene as vivid as the Bad Seeds’ ‘Weeping Song’: “go tell your momma there’s a dead man in the bathwater / Or go tell your father that the town’s lost another daughter”.

That’s not to say she doesn’t bring the fury and vocal brimstone when necessary, as on the aforementioned ‘You Are Jaguar’. Prince of Truth sees Bozulich bring everything, as she usually does, at the right time. I could mention the wonderfully sparse string arrangement on ‘Iris Didn’t Spell’, the surreal film noir of ‘Tremble Dragonfly’ or the epic, pitch black concluding lullaby of ‘On the Captain’s Side’. But it’s all so consistently good that this review would stretch into the thousands, rather than hundreds, of words.

Carla Bozulich should be an icon at this point: Nick Cave without the horrid recent cabaret-and-‘tache phase; a more prolific Scott Walker; a sexier Blixa Bargeld; an infinitely better version of pretty much any post-rock this decade. And yet, not post-rock at all. Not alternative country, nor near-industrial, nor no-wave. A personnel list on Bob Mould’s self-titled 1996 album simply read “Bob Mould is Bob Mould”. In that case, the only justified point of description would be to declare, admittedly obviously, that Carla Bozulich is Carla Bozulich.

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You can also read this review over at Fact Magazine. And it’s one of their Recommended Albums, as well it should be. I’d also like to mention how tough it is to review Carla. I was going to review her live show from last summer, but Fact declined. She apparently wasn’t sufficiently cool, though thankfully, they are now on board with her awesomeness. Sometimes ‘cool’ isn’t directly related to how dubsteppy it is. But I digress. She’s tough to review. In a way, I was quite relieved I didn’t have to review that gig, because it was such an emotionally intense, personally moving, experience, that it would have been hard to express to the reader. I know that’s the coward’s way out; reviewing isn’t supposed to be easy. And it is supposed to be about articulating the intangible; expressing quite why a particular experience or work of art is worthy of someone’s time.

So I’m glad I got to do this. Carla’s records are never easy, either to listen to or to explain. This one went okay though – I’m quite happy with it. And the gig? Hopefully I will be sufficiently motivated, in the near future, to put together a list of my favourite gigs this decade. Rest assured it will be high on that list.

Flood Of Red – Leaving Everything Behind

Scottish sextet Flood Of Red bring their own brand of emo urgency on this debut full-length, though not without mis-steps like the wrong-footed, ill-advised introductory track. But once the soppy ‘The Edge of the World (Prelude)’ falls by the wayside, the band’s natural pace comes to the fore. For the most part, this is reasonably busy melodic punk rock, with distinctly late-nineties lead guitar melodies. Not a bad thing, for those who recall the glory days of Gameface and Sense Field.

Speaking of Sense Field, the vocals are intriguing: they contain enough personality to engage, but there is a high-register softness to them that sits rather uncomfortably with the angst they’re aiming for. Such juxtaposition is perhaps the intent, and sometimes works effectively as a council-estate Mars Volta. But over the course of fifty-odd minutes, they can grate. What presumably aims for intense lyrical poignancy misses the mark somewhat, as song after song features lines like ‘I’m so scared of everything’ and ‘I have never been so scared’. The words are clearly shortcuts to emotion, but they ring hollow.

There is the occasional electronic beat or stab of synth, but such events are throwaway details. Blink, and you will miss what are effectively novelty, an obliged concession to modernity, rather than a desire to push things forward. There are times when the dynamic range extends beyond medium to up-tempo rock: ‘Electricity’ is a brief interlude of sonic introspection, which leads seamlessly into the more substantial ‘I Will Not Change’. While it’s no ‘Parabol’/’Parabola’, it’s a decent stab at injecting some art into their well-trodden template.

What is here is competent. The lead guitar flutters freely through melody and riff, though the rhythm guitar is a tad slushy. Combined with the singer’s soft timbre, the mix runs the risk of collapsing into liquid homogeneity. One suspects the band has missed a trick here: they could potentially make a virtue of this aural coalescence by upping the reverb and stretching out in a My Bloody Valentine/Serena Maneesh-style dreampop reverie. Concluding track ‘The Edge of the World’ actually hints at this kind of sound. Conversely, if they want to bring the rock, they could aim for a producer like GGGarth for their next record, a man who brought fellow Celts Kerbdog and Biffy Clyro into brutally effective clarity.

In terms of modern emo, Flood Of Red are more comparable to the softer, sensitive (remember when ’emo’ was an abbreviation for ’emotional’, rather than a pejorative for kids in eyeliner?) Thursday than the epically melodramatic My Chemical Romance or 30 Seconds To Mars. I want to like this more than I do. The band has no small amount of talent and the occasional spark of imagination. It’s just that such sparks are too rare, and their songs get lost in among each other, in a near hour-long slog of driving riffs and soft singing. Flood Of Red have potential, but Leaving Everything Behind presents too large a lump of music for the ideas on display. Tightening up the sound for the next album, as well as finding their own identity, should pay dividends for them.

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POSTSCRIPT: This is my first review for The Music Magazine. Check ’em out!

Akron/Family: ‘River’

Taken from lovely current album Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free, ‘River’ is rather more joyous than one would expect from a group of Young God alumni. It’s the kind of thing one might compare to The Flaming Lips, if only Wayne Coyne’s travelling circus had released anything decent this decade. Opening with a more organic take on that wonderfully sinister Massive Attack ‘Angel’ beat – albeit with some shaker thing going on – ‘River’ builds fantastically.

The singer has that super-American nasality to his voice, not unlike your man from They Might Be Giants, though perhaps a tad warmer. This tune is thankfully less wacky than, well, pretty much anything by TMBG (although ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ is forever a pop classic), with gorgeously busy arrangement. In fact, when ‘River’ does kick in, the vocal melody does recall the playfully innocent, heartening, verses of ‘Birdhouse…’

The words don’t seem to make too much sense, but they sound nice when placed in close proximity to each other, which is really all you could ask for from this sort of band. The whole shebang has that great-outdoors party feel that we associate with Animal Collective in the oh-nine. But where the Maryland sometime-quartet bring the neo-Beta Band synth-shine, this is organic as fuck. The good kind of organic, like Alasdair Roberts or Earth. Not the bad kind, like Newton Faulkner or Dent May. Just get the album, as this isn’t even the best song on it. And I don’t even have much time for Americana.

Download it here.

Jay Reatard – Watch Me Fall

Matador (2009)

Internet punk rock darling Reatard is back with his second Matador album (let’s face it: Singles ’08 was an album on staggered – and ridiculously diminishing – release). But does this new record see the rock world ready to live in his shadow, or is he fading all away?

Whether Jay is heading down the dread road of ‘maturity’ is as yet unclear. He’s less overtly aggressive, that’s for sure. Gone is the energising comedy-horror intensity of Blood Visions. In its place is a more subdued, though arguably no less disconcerting, mood. ‘I’m Watching You’ (presumably the same song that was missing from review copies of Singles ’08), rather than breathlessly ripping through frantic chords, is positively jolly in its hazy 60s, via Inspiral Carpets’ organ-indie, pastiche. This just makes his singing ‘I’m watching you, and everything you do’ that bit weirder.

Watch Me Fall is approximately half the tempo of Blood Visions. Despite that, there is the occasional ‘Hang Them All’ which captures the brutalist pop charm of a ‘See/Saw’ with ease. The mid-way switch in the song is a lovely surprise, too. Overall, though, the guitars are lighter, Reatard opting for indie jangle. This sound admittedly fits the relative aesthetic levity of the songs, and his singing is now oddly reminiscent of Suede’s fey frontman Brett Anderson (especially on the aforementioned ‘I’m Watching You’ and ‘Can’t Do it Anymore’). If this is a conscious effort to distance himself from the rapidly expanding throng of lo-fi trust fund punx, Jay is to be commended. He’s certainly more imaginative than the fuzz-drenched muppets he’s leaving in his wake.

‘Rotten Mind’ is a striking pop gem, and its juxtaposition with the sinister introduction of ‘Nothing Now’ (the evil twin of Terrorvision’s ‘Alice, What’s the Matter?’) displays a sense of dynamic structure that would justify this evolution in the Reatard sound. But there’s something missing. While Reatard does not need to bludgeon in order to be good, you do get the sense there’s a bit of an identity crisis going on. Like Andrew WK, you’re happy for him to leave the mosh pit, but his first steps out of there are slightly shaky.

As a portent of things to come, Watch Me Fall is heartening. It’s more varied than any of his past single albums, and hits spots both familiar and new for him. It’s just not quite the killer release for which Matador may have been hoping. Early Mondo Generator did this kind of thing better, and Reatard himself has hit greater heights, with Blood Visions and Lost Sounds. Look away from the hype, though, and this is a solid rock album.