Evangelista: Prince of Truth

Want your darkness dredged up and puppeteered before thy very eyes? Carla Bozulich is your lady, along with this veritable host of Montrealians including everybody’s favourite contre-basse player Thierry Amar… well mine anyway, he’s all over my record collection like an experimental Canadian rash.

I’ve got a copy of the first Evangelista record downstairs, which is called Evangelista and is actually a Carla Bozulich record whose title gave birth to the group name as it took shape and, err, “blossomed” into its current incarnation: a core trio featuring Bozulich, bassist Tara Barnes and Keyboard/Sound Dude Dominic Cramp.  

I loved that record, and although the track I always go back for is in fact a cover of Low’s ‘Pissing’ I’m currently getting very excited about going back for the full nine rounds, if memory serves it’s a phenomenal immersion. I haven’t had a chance to hear last year’s Hello Voyager, people say it’s good, but I can’t comment.

So here we are with Prince of Truth. According to the press release Bozulich has a bee in her bonnet, a bee that got lost while searching for the Truth and it seems to suggest that if the Bee can settle down and just accept that Spring has past and there’s no chance of honey-making anytime soon or most likely Never it might just find some form of transcendent wisdom. Or something like that. 

As I wrote those few paragraphs some phrases settled like black snow on the nose and rightfully broke the concentration:

“Go tell your momma there’s a dead man in the bath water”

“Don’t try to warm me, I’m colder than anyone, can

I drop this world right where it shines in my hand…”

“You are a jaguar in catacombs of racecar, of mylar and feathers, death trip of levers”

The first two are from ‘I Lay There in Front of Me Covered in Ice’ and the third from ‘You are a Jaguar’. Both tracks veer and list from Black Jazz to Screechy Improv Dirge on a whim and neither do much for me. Particularly when Bozulich closes out the latter with a creepy, fearful whisper, desperately intoned like an anti-spell.

It’s as if someone is reading a William Burroughs novel to a child as a bedtime story, trying to maintain the barest semblance of calm with the knowledge that there is sadistic killer in the house. Now that isn’t the kind of simile you get in Sociology class, but I know The Well from whence Bozulich is drawing these performances. However, as a listening experience all I get is an oscillating experience of tension and anxious release, all coloured by foreboding and fuelled by desperate interpersonal breakdowns where love lies shattered on the floor like the shards of a Truth telling mirror.

And yes, the album is at times mega-fragmentary. People will tell you that so and so is messing with archetypal songforms and all that malarkey but in reality what’s happening is that someone’s having a good time stitching together myriad scraps of live recording into a strangely proportioned scarecrow, then threading it together with a narrative and pushing it out into the world on 180gsm vinyl and download. It’s successful mostly, whatever that means.

‘Crack Teeth’ layers meandering bass, piano and processed multi-vocals over sparse jazz inflected percussion, with the occasional splurge of surreal synth that sounds like it was sampled from a video game. Is it really successful? I don’t know what the parameters are beyond engaging and I don’t know if I care to be honest. It sounds like the workings of a crazy person, as does most of the album. “Duh!” I hear you say?

Yeah, well, before we get into some limp “it’s those that are cracked that let the light shine through” baloney, can I just suggest that if someone tells you that they’re setting out to test/prove that there is “no logic and perhaps no Truth at the base of anything” don’t you think they should start articulating quick sharp rather than embark on an indulgent lyrical/musical Cut-Ups experiment? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

So yeah, colonialism, abuses of power, personal disorientation/disintegration and death, they’re all pretty heavy, and it’s hard to make sense of any of it, so let’s make art. Is that a valid choice? Do I mean noble? Am I vengeful Moralist? Who the fuck are you? It’s contagious, this anxiety thing.

The last one, a pseudo sea-shanty, sounds like it was written by someone whose been listening to a whole pile of A Silver Mt Zion and reading the Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, it surfaces with an added dash of clumsy metaphor transgressions and desolation. At least the Mt Zion metaphors make sense… ahhh! Truth, I get it. The first one, ‘The Slayer’… ah fuck it, I have better things to be doing with my time.