Fearless singer
Carla Bozulich was never known for following a conventional path in her art -- and
Evangelista -- her latest band/project which unites a number of her old collaborators with a variety of equally out-there musicians from the thriving Montreal indie music scene -- is an affair that's understandably far from conventional. Still,
Prince of Truth,
Evangelista's second record, is a challenging listen even by the rather expansive standards of everyone involved. On
Hello, Voyager, their first communal record,
Evangelista seemed like a band flopping about in search of direction, dashing from art-punk to haunted balladry to avant-garde, noisy freak-outs reaching sky-high. Here, they burn down to the ground whatever was achieved the last time around and start anew. All notions of recognizable song forms are chucked out the window, as
Evangelista turns instead to the very fabric of elemental sound, some primordial sonic soup from which strange things are molded; things that take shape and morph and dissolve before our very eyes. Instruments are not so much played as engaged to produce various sound textures that are then intertwined into larger masses of sound. "The Slayer" sets the right mood of extremely tense uncertainty, taking half of its running time to emerge from the mire of guitar scrapes and noises as the beautifully ugly and surprisingly heavy dirge it is. Several tracks, like the funereal elegy of "Iris Didn't Spell" and the barely there "Tremble Dragonfly" spend their time drifting in and out of focus; tension is continuously built but almost never resolved, making
Prince of Truth a dark, claustrophobic record. In fact, one of the more fully formed pieces, a nightmarish dub-jazz "Crack Teeth," would've sounded too spooky even for a David Lynch movie. Almost the only moment of release comes on "You Are a Jaguar" where Bozulich's voice follows a rather simple melody rising from a whisper to a full-throated screech and then dropping back to whisper again, while the band answers with swells of cathartic noise. By the time the closing "On the Captain's Side" rolls around -- all sinister humming and disembodied voices carrying a sea shanty from beyond --
Prince of Truth is back on a brink of some nameless void. It makes clear that
Evangelista is dead certain about continuing its brave foray into a huge and dark unknown. And if their future reports from those out-there realms are as strange and captivating as
Prince of Truth, it's hard not to wish for their journey to continue as long as possible. ~ Sergey Mesenov
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