Evangelista - In Animal Tongue

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Led by art/punk legend Carla Bozulich, who previously fronted The Geraldine Fibbers and Ethyl Meatplow. Fourth full-length album from Evangelista, which is Bozulich’s primary and most personal current musical project following the critically acclaimed Prince Of Truth (2009) that cemented Carla Bozulich’s reputation for aesthetic quality, intensity and iconoclasm as she entered a third decade of tireless artistic and musical activity. [Prince Of Truth is] a fascinating interplay of conventional song forms and more experimental tendencies...there’s a barely restrained brutality to this music, which seems always on the edge of something, either a descent into the abyss or elevation to some majestic heights... POPMATTERS. Evangelista’s new album continues to broaden the sonic canvas against which Bozulich deploys her distinctive voice and lyricism. In Animal Tongue reflects Bozulich’s escape from her Los Angeles home base and an increasingly nomadic existence in the last couple of years, devoted in equal parts to collaboration and improvisation with a wide range of players in diverse contexts, the conception and execution of site-specific sound/art events and residencies, rocking the circuit with Evangelista (equally at home in bright museums and dingy clubs) and retreats to the American desert. In Animal Tongue was chiefly written and recorded by Bozulich, in a variety of locations, driven (in Carla’s words) “by the forces of rocks, evolution, geology, drugs, boxing, everything-ology and dead stuff that makes the dirt and cement and the tress grow. Plus real versus fake!!!” We’re pretty sure this doesn’t mean she was actually taking drugs, but without doubt the album steams and bubbles like a surreal simmering cauldron, with carefully metered elements stirred and coagulating around a core of low-end provided by Tara Barnes on bass, seasoned with piano, organ and cut-and-paste arrangements by Dominic Cramp. This core trio is augmented by Sam Mickens (The Dead Science), Shahzad Ismaily (Laurie Anderson, Secret Chiefs, Sam Amidon) and John Eichenseer (jhno), who contribute to several tracks. Through it all, Bozulich’s powerfully adventurous voice weaves vital, semi-improvisatory melodies of gasping, restrained intensity (“Artificial Lamb”, “Bells Ring Fire”), brooding incantation (“In Animal Tongue”, “Hands Of Leather”, “Die Alone”) and a rich half-whispered alto (“Black Jesus”, “Enter The Prince”). In Animal Tongue is a superb addition to Bozulich’s canon and as original a voice as can be found at the current nexus of punk, poetry, and experimental music.

Tracklist:

1 Artificial Lamb
2 In Animal Tongue
3 Black Jesus
4 Bells Ring Fire
5 Hands Of Leather
6 Tunnel To The Stars
7 Die Alone
8 Enter The Prince
9 Hatching

Rune Kjær Rasmussen said:

This is to me an album I kind of thought
would not ever come. It is such a distillation of everything I find so
amazing, so breathtakingly wonderful because of its courageous intensity
and fragility in everything Carla Bozulich touches. I am overwhelmed by
most things I listen to made by her or involving her, because she has a
magic way of creating with her miracle of a voice and her poetry of
music making a place that I somehow feel like I have been before but
never, or almost never, in this raw, this uncontrollable but yet very
focused way. To me a lot of songs by or with Carla Bozulich are events.
They are the exquisite moments in my collection of music which I do not
want to visit too often because they are so brilliant, so close to an
intensity I can relate to, I ration them a bit. In that way every single
time I hear it I am home. The album 'In Animal Tongue' is that home all
the way. The energy that seeps through different cracks in the music is
like different trains just waiting for some passenger to come aboard so
someone can look through the windows of that particular window out at
that particular landscape. To be that passenger feels so privileged.To
experience music made by such adventurous and great musicians like
Evangelista with their many guests is superb. And the trains pass
through different platforms where someone wants to show what is lost but
not gone, what is in shreds but not burned to ashes, this is intimacy
asking for a ticket and entering this life, this moment in the shape of
music so generous it feels like it is dreaming about itself while it is
moving along, the sources are definitely natural, wild and untamed, an
essential humanity reaching for its potential and achieving it, then
giving it away as this gift of energy, this music. I had really high
expectations to this album. I was blown away by it. It is everything I
hoped for but much more than that as well. I could go on and on about it
but it will be too much. I only hope with this small review to have
made you curious enough to check it out and experience it for yourself.
It is just so unbelievably good!