{grate 4} Upon first listen, the Evangelicals sound like some
underground cult of theater-school dropouts, playing broken instruments between
laser-tag sessions. It’s fitting, then, that they’re a product of
famous for birthing weirdos like the Flaming Lips and horror-glam group
Chainsaw Kittens.
Their album, The Evening Descends, is a kitchen sink mash-up
that bewilders before you realize that every pumping, pulsating bleep is in its
perfect place. This realization takes place somewhere between the 18th and 19th
repetition, so don’t feel too bad if the flamboyant boys’ genius isn’t
immediately apparent.
Descends’ sequence of symphonics strings together clips of
borrowed basement leftovers with operatic, dazing harmonies. It doesn’t matter
what the words are — the electrifying tremors, cushioned by occasional, echoing
airplane suctions are compelling enough to stand alone, if impossible to
classify.
Every genre-bending track plays like it once began with
overlapping scribbles of dissonance, chiseled here and there to eventually
forge a sighing psalm of restraint, grieving and operatic liberation (the kind
you scream off the uppermost floor of a city building).
But then again, the words do matter for their
unpredictability — some words are spoken like the cracked PA announcements of
an abandoned schoolyard, some are sung like the sacred musings of a divine
chorus and others still are belted out in heartbreaking sincerity. As the
scales peel off into howling, you’re transported into the nightmarish
conscience of an institutionalized schizophrenic who believes in voices.
This fluctuation between reality and imagination is backed
by an instrumental overload that’s more skill than overkill. On songs like
“Party Crashing,” the arcade overloads and jingles don’t stifle delightfully
lurid outpours, which pause only for a few lines of B-movie dialogue (“Son …
you’ve been in an accident…/ What?/ They’ve severed your legs …”)
But masterpieces like “Bellawood” are what make the album
unforgettable; the track is introduced by the sound of bone chewing and the
tremble of violins, which gateway into African pattering and haunting twists of
the electro-theramin — and before you can question it all, Josh Jones sobs,
“Strange things keep happening!” and the commotion liquefies into the fairy
glockenspiel of the next track, “Paperback Suicide.” In fact, all the songs
seem to bleed into a single puddle of fantasy, until it’s evaporated into the
evening (just in time for the next showing of Rocky Horror).
