Evangelista
Hello, Voyager

"Happily buzzing through the dark sky with my hand in my pants. I can't dance but I can blow like the wind. Pay no attention to the trouble I'm in. Goodnight mad Saint Anne, takes another bite mad Saint Anne."

The Evangelista is the latest band of Bozulich, former leader of bands such as Geraldine Fibbers and Ethyl Meatplow. Half roots music-half Punk the former, totally Alternative/Industrial the latter. (Both bone-crushing, of course.)

Carla Bozulich is a turbulent woman, restless and adventurous. She's a former drug addict and prostitute and has many things to tell you. And in "Hello Voyager" she does it best, vomiting raw and harsh melodies while maneuvering through dark Blues-like atmospheres, dark visceral Post-Rock and gloomy and disturbing Free remnants.

She writhes on her battered guitar, hurling sparse and dry chords that are close relatives of New York No Wave and sings her sibylline and vindictive verses. Sometimes she screams them, blinded by remorse and her ghosts, wrestling with discontinuous percussion and poignant strings, other times she recites them, softly, like a psalm, a weak and blurred supplication, pierced by a layer of scorching distortions.

She infects and captivates you with her lived and visceral voice, hoarse and worn out, whether she plays at being PJ in a "Winds Of St. Anne" that reeks of intoxicated and stylized Blues, or when she indulges in mysticism and the floating and intertwined warbles of "The Frozen Dress", when she mocks you in the rotten and nocturnal Jazz of "Lucky Lucky Luck" complete with choruses and when she scratches disdainfully in the surprising "Smooth Jazz", marching rhythm percussions, edgy and nihilistic guitars and a crazy organ that drags funereally throughout the album, finally imploding in "Hello Voyager", a lacerating declaration of intent, a collapse of trumpets, resounding percussion, plodding rhythms and violent bursts of electric guitar, with Bozulich screaming harsh supplications and, finally, exhausted by whirlwinds and electric contortions, she collapses and murmurs suffering, martyr and victim of abandonment, abuse and captivity.

Bozulich does not sketch, does not paint with watercolors, but presses on paper with her red ink, splashing barren landscapes, plows deep into the earth with her plow of burning words and repressed violence, takes snapshots of fields destroyed after the war and shoves them under our noses as they are, without retouching them. No mannerism, nor little flowers to lighten the mood. She drags you into a dense emotional tangle, so much so that at some point in the album you can no longer understand if Bozulich is singing to rid herself of her demons or if you are the psychopath and she is exorcizing yours.

Heart-wrenching and profound like a dark female version of Nick Cave.

"These are the rules when you come to my town: When the wind blows there's no rules."