Carla Bozulich
Evangelista

[Constellation, 2006]

Styles: alt-country, traditional country
Others: Current 93, Tom Waits, Nels Cline, Catherine Irwin, Neko Case, Woven Hand

"You will be cradled and near deafened by love and mercy sounds and the sound of your own pulsing blood which used to drive me mad as a child when I would try to go to sleep... " -Carla Bozulich

Evangelista, a striking black ’n’ cream bombshell, fits Bozulich’s description very well. The nine tracks span 45 wretched minutes seemingly haunted by the soul of a folk singer condemned to live out her days within the burnt-out coils of a busted AM radio. Thorny low-dial static tears her voice as dissonant reams of organ, cello, and violin pile upon each other like body bags holding irradiated corpses. Bozulich’s voice trembles with barely contained anger and lunacy; her dystopic sermons glow in half-reflected moonlight.

The composition here is skilled, but far from fussy: sometimes it’s just Bozulich moaning over attic creaks and ominous door-knockings, before sawing organ and cello harmonies plunge down like rusted knives between shoulder blades. The shifts from full and furious orchestration to barren, broken solitude make "How to Survive Being Hit by Lightning" this album’s most emblematic track: it opens with prickly static and anxious feedback, trembling between frequencies, while clean guitar tones rise like fat silver balloons and lonely kick drums thunk ponderously in the distance. Bozulich briefly picks up the tune and tone of an abandoned spiritual, while the awful miasma continues to swirl; she wrestles with the traditional hymn; the gnarled sonic briars are finally burnt off and cleared away so a choir of fallen angels can conclude. This kind of ravishing drama plays out within each song and spikes and tumbles across the duration of the whole album.

I think Flannery O’Connor would have listened to this before she killed off one of her characters. I listen to it all the fucking time.

1. Evangelista I
2. Steal Away
3. How to Survive Being Hit by Lightning
4. Inside Sleeps
5. Baby, That’s the Creeps
6. Pissing
7. Prince of the World
8. Nels’ Box
9. Evangelista II