Evangelista - "Lucky Lucky Luck" (mp3)
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a long and affectionate piece here about the works of Carla Bozulich (and actually got an e-mail about it from Carla herself, regarding some of the rare live recordings I'd mentioned in the post). One of the things I said about the (at the time) recent Evangelista, the first album of original material she'd ever released as a solo artist, was that it wasn't among my favorite of the many phases of her career, and that I was "kind of waiting for her to move onto something else." A lot of Bozulich's music can be accurately described as violently cathartic, full of blood-curdling screams and noise, but Evangelista was so dark and forbidding that it made a lot of her previous work seem bright and peppy by comparison. In fact, it was a little overwhelming to me, and I had a hard time listening to it much, and in a way kind of hoped that that record was just something she had to get off her chest once and then be done with. So my usual excitement about a new album from her this year, Hello, Voyager, was slightly tempered by the news that it would be credited to the band name Evangelista, implying that it'd be a continuation of that last album I never entirely warmed up to.
Evangelista the band is still really as much a solo project as Evangelista the album was; a few musicians show up on multiple tracks (Tara Barnes, Shahzad Ismaily, some Silver Mt. Zion/Godspeed You Black Emperor people), but for the most part it's a revolving door of collaborators, including one song by Bozulich completely solo, and one with her onetime perennial sideman, Nels Cline, the gorgeous "The Blue Room" (which is the "Untitled New Song" recorded at a 2004 Scarnella show that I'd included in the aforementioned mix). As such, Hello, Voyager is a much more varied album than Evangelista, and, to my ears, a better one.
The overall tone is pretty similiar to the last album, with a few tracks featuring orchestras of doom and warped preacher rants from Bozulich, but there's also the welcome return of drums, which whip up a storm a couple times, mainly on "Smooth Jazz" and "Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space." And there's some moments that lighten things up, like the weirdly playful "Lucky Lucky Luck," which might address Bozulich's sordid youth more autobiographically than anything she's done since The Geraldine Fibbers, or might just be some goofy narrative about guns and drug dealers with a pulsing bassline and a "woohoo" hook. It never quite explodes like it would've in the hands of the Fibbers, but somehow I like it that way. I can't wait to see how they do this record live when they come through D.C. in a couple weeks, and I skipped the local date on the tour for the last record.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a long and affectionate piece here about the works of Carla Bozulich (and actually got an e-mail about it from Carla herself, regarding some of the rare live recordings I'd mentioned in the post). One of the things I said about the (at the time) recent Evangelista, the first album of original material she'd ever released as a solo artist, was that it wasn't among my favorite of the many phases of her career, and that I was "kind of waiting for her to move onto something else." A lot of Bozulich's music can be accurately described as violently cathartic, full of blood-curdling screams and noise, but Evangelista was so dark and forbidding that it made a lot of her previous work seem bright and peppy by comparison. In fact, it was a little overwhelming to me, and I had a hard time listening to it much, and in a way kind of hoped that that record was just something she had to get off her chest once and then be done with. So my usual excitement about a new album from her this year, Hello, Voyager, was slightly tempered by the news that it would be credited to the band name Evangelista, implying that it'd be a continuation of that last album I never entirely warmed up to.
Evangelista the band is still really as much a solo project as Evangelista the album was; a few musicians show up on multiple tracks (Tara Barnes, Shahzad Ismaily, some Silver Mt. Zion/Godspeed You Black Emperor people), but for the most part it's a revolving door of collaborators, including one song by Bozulich completely solo, and one with her onetime perennial sideman, Nels Cline, the gorgeous "The Blue Room" (which is the "Untitled New Song" recorded at a 2004 Scarnella show that I'd included in the aforementioned mix). As such, Hello, Voyager is a much more varied album than Evangelista, and, to my ears, a better one.
The overall tone is pretty similiar to the last album, with a few tracks featuring orchestras of doom and warped preacher rants from Bozulich, but there's also the welcome return of drums, which whip up a storm a couple times, mainly on "Smooth Jazz" and "Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space." And there's some moments that lighten things up, like the weirdly playful "Lucky Lucky Luck," which might address Bozulich's sordid youth more autobiographically than anything she's done since The Geraldine Fibbers, or might just be some goofy narrative about guns and drug dealers with a pulsing bassline and a "woohoo" hook. It never quite explodes like it would've in the hands of the Fibbers, but somehow I like it that way. I can't wait to see how they do this record live when they come through D.C. in a couple weeks, and I skipped the local date on the tour for the last record.
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