One thing you can always count on with Carla Bozulich and her Evangelista project is presence. But while her music has an immediacy to it that urges you to wallow in its distended structures, miserable repetitions, and noisy excursions, her raw, unhinged lyrics often have forward trajectory: poetic yet narrative, abstracted yet linear, isolated yet cumulative. It’s thrilling to follow her music because it feels like at any moment Bozulich could just as likely burst into a beautiful, heart-wrenching melody as a discordant wail, no matter what the music behind it is signifying.
“Artificial Lamb,” the first track off her 2011 album In Animal Tongue (TMT Review), continues a similar yet perhaps subtler approach, with lonely repetitive guitar accentuated by Bozulich’s fluid vocal stylings: “I’m metal, I’m metal/ I’m an automating thing/ Oh darling dear, oh darling dear/ I’ll be hiding inside until the earth disappears.” The video matches the song’s thrust, where the fluidity of living meets mechanical reality, and the movement of life comes with planetary implications, a study in “everything-ology” that conjures what Split Foster rightly described as “pagan rituals, exalted deaths, and erotic visions.” Look in its cracked eye and you’ll see planets.
• Evangelista: http://www.evangelistasounds.com
• Carla Bozulich: http://www.carlabozulich.com
• Constellation: http://www.cstrecords.com
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