or where carla bozulich indulges her inner swan (not cygnus but the blackened no-wave skree of gira and jarboe).
always interested by the crazy lines you can draw from the noise and avant-whatever to folk / blues / country twanging. and ms. bozulich offers up a rather fine example wandering as she does between the worlds of nels cline, willie nelson, constellation records, the geraldine fibbers, low, xiu xiu and a hundred other random junctions.
this is the least straightforward of the evangelista records. adopting a rather burroughsian approach to making the record after a musically debilitating illness, by stitching together her bands disparate recordings post-recovery. it’s all nouvelle vague jump cuts and pro-tools editing collage improv.
markers? lots of esses. swordfishtrombones, steve reich, set fire to flames, scott walker, sunn o))). and blixa bargeld. yep. really. it’s that fucking odd. a hideous beautiful-ugly mélange that’s as much noise as it is jazz as it is industrial as it is blues. i’m sure i recall her refering to the earlier evangelista records as gospel noise. which is actually pretty accurate. not that it’s all bared teeth. there’s a dead calm that frequently worms its way in. tension then release then tension then release. y’get the picture.
there’s a rumble of noise and klang of guitar which jitters and glitches into discordant squall that opens the album. it’s called the slayer. it could almost be a deconstruction (if you squint aurally) of something tom araya would write.
it’s not that there’s no proper song / structure on here (there is) it’s just more like an exercise in rock band musique concrète.
so you get the viscous gun wielding phil spector evil atonal glare of you are jaguar, which channels pj harvey’s snake, katiejane garside and lydia lunch. there’s something vague and sexual and threatening about it. rest your head / black hair / red bed. beautiful and abrasive. sickly and hungry and cathartic all at the same time.
but you also get the fucked country noir and mangled strings of tremble dragonfly, i lay there in front of me covered in ice and iris didn’t spell which screech and drone and lapsteel in a scraping layered lullaby nightmare that sounds like the cowboy junkies gone horrible horribly wrong.
and the jazz creak and rattle of decrepit dust-soaked waits on crack teeth. which is all rust covered lounge and cheap synth creepy dorothy valens chanteuse.
it ends with on the captain’s side and a ten minute wash of muffled noise and harmonised voice. layered and laden with textured doom. it could be a tale of the sea. it could be some apocalyptic sea shanty. it could be one of those ancient folk songs about dead lovers who never come back. it’s a strange quietly booming lament. something that could be said about the whole damn thing.
it’s taken me a month to decipher this bugger. and i’m still working on it. but it’s worth working at. harsh and exquisite like a good malt i think.
