Full disclosure, I am a HUGE Carla Bozulich fan. HUGE! What first brought my attention to her existence was her appearance on Nels Cline’s wildly aggresive punk-jazz offering Destroy All Nels Cline. The next I heard of her was when she covered Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album, in its entirety. Digging deeper, I discovered that she’s always skirted the edges of punk and country, often collaborating with Nels along the way.
In 2006, she released Evangelista, a terrifyingly powerful album filled with ambient drones, piercing strings, and a severely unconventional approach to form. Needless to say, I was hooked. After the album was released, Carla assembled a more or less permanent band for touring and subsequent recordings (currently consisting of bassist Tara Barnes and multi-instrumentalist/composer Dominic Cramp), and thus the band Evangelista was born.
Counting the 2006 release, In Animal Tongue is the fourth album from Bozulich/Evangelista. On previous records, the band aimed for a more readily identifyable post-punk sound, with plenty of drums and guitars and driving rhythm. On their latest offering, however, these traits are largely absent. Most of the songs make sparse use of percussion, or leave it out altogether. The first half of the album, from “Artificial Lamb” to “Bells Ring Fire,” threadbare textures are employed, with seldom anything more than a guitar or organ supporting Bozulich’s voice.
This dark and hollow air is lifted, at least briefly, by “Hands of Leather,” by far the most rhythmically driven piece on the set. Opening with a few contrapuntal voices and guitars snaking up an ascending major scale, it quickly settles into a celebratory dance, driven ever onward by handclaps.
The spell is soon broken, however. The next song, “Tunnel to the Stars,” is driven by a giddily out-of-tune string quartet doing its best hurdy-gurdy imitation, over which Bozulich sings an ode to a lover of convienence. “When you sleep it’s amazing, you hold my hand to your heart like a bird,” she sings sweetly, taking pleasure in their shared warmth. But side by side with this physical openness and warmth, we find a chilly emotional distance: ”it doesn’t much matter…that we should part, or how little we promised.” The quartet circles itself helplessly, unable to strike forward, like a snippet of Luney Tunes music stuck in a perpetual loop. The effect is at once comical and frightening, and serves to underscore the emotional disconnect of the protagonist.
Lyrically, Bozulich doesn’t cover much new territory here. On each of the Evangelista albums to date, she has explored dark subject matter, from time to time also employing radical honesty and an evangelist’s flair to drive home her points. What is new, here, is her occasional break into half-improvised lyrics, reminiscent of Mick Jagger’s work with the Rolling Stones. It doesn’t always work (it didn’t for Jagger, either, if we’re being honest), although it can serve to pull back a listener whose attention has drifted.
What’s most compelling about this album to me is its dynamic range. In an era when artists and producers are sacrificing soft and medium volume levels in the pursuit of loud and louder (much the same way movie theatres switched out small and medium drinks for jumbo and instant-diabetes sizes), it’s spellbinding to hear an album so quiet. On some tracks, like the enigmatic Enter the Prince, even Carla’s vocals are brought down to the threshold of audibility.
In Animal Tongue represents the latest step in Carla Bozulich’s ever expanding range. She’s already light years removed from the punk-tinged country of her ’90s collaborations with Nels Cline, and on each of the Evangelista records she’s drifted further into the avant-garde. It’ll be interesting to see where this journey leads.
