Send "Evangelista " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Carla Bozulich has explored the relationship between song forms, noise, and experimentalism for much of her career. Having contributed to a variety of post-punk recordings in the 1980s, she went on to found the industrial group Ethyl Meatplow, whose 1993 album Happy Days Sweetheart added an explicit and vital contribution to the postfeminist debates of a year that also saw the release of Björk’s Debut, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Bozulich then proceeded through the occasionally riotous country rock of Geraldine Fibbers before releasing a series of albums under her own name, including a version of the Willie Nelson album Red Headed Stranger in 2003. In 2006 she put out the album Evangelista on Montreal’s Constellation label, famous as the home of Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion. Members of the Godspeed/Zion collective contributed to the album and its successor Hello Voyager, by which time Bozulich had adopted the name Evangelista for her group....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| Although she’s been appearing on records (by The Geraldine Fibbers, Ethyl Meatplow, Scarnella, The Nels Cline Singers and many, many more) for over a quarter of a century, 2006 solo album Evangelista was arguably the most significant of Los Angeles-based singer Carla Bozulich’s career. Her debut for Constellation Records not only gave its name to the band she now fronts, but, more significantly, it is the record that pioneered the sonic territory that band have gone on to explore. Its heady mix of gothic blues, improvisational noise, howled and whispered vocals and moments of eerie calm continued on the first ‘proper’ Evangelista record, Hello, Voyager, and now resurfaces with Prince of Truth. The seven bleak songs contained herein tiptoe around the fringes of melody. They constantly focus and refocus, leaving listeners with a feeling that something unknown is always going on in the background. They are like huge wall paintings lit only with a tiny candle: you are aware of their grandiose beauty even if you can’t quite make it out through the darkness. Album opener 'The Slayer' gradually raises its head though a couple of minutes of jittery concrète cut-ups. Like a leviathan awakening, Evangelista build a threatening wall of sound before Bozulich intones with bleak insistence: “This is the speed I fly/I’m all alone and that you know”. The song soon shudders to a halt before reanimating with a clattering rhythm reminiscent of mid-period Einstürzende Neubauten, spattered with atonal, doom-laden guitars as the lyrics becomes a apocryphal chant....full text |
| Strangeglue |
| 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....full text |
Evangelista lyrics
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