I have to pat myself on the back, I think, for figuring out this morning while listening to Hello, Voyager, the new album by Evangelista, Carla Bozulich's band, that "The Winds of St. Anne" in the opening song are probably the Santa Anas... even though I'm a New Yorker who's never been as far as the Pacific time zone. And that the line "here's to St. Anne who's gone mad" probably isn't the strange gothic utterance it might sound like at first listen, but a typical playful carla-ism... and when St. Anne goes mad she's blowing the wind around and creating those brush fires we're lucky not to have here in the east. People are probably going to read this thinking I'm a master of the obvious, but I've read some reviews that take the opening track as a black hole of anguish, and as always it's jolting hearing Carla screaming and it does sound really dark (there's this wall of sound where Carla's playing an harmonium and her voice is sampled into shadows in the background and Shahzad Ismaily sounds like he's playing a few layers of drum and guitar) ... but what makes me feel like I've done a little time warp back to the Geraldine Fibbers days is that the opening couplet in this new context is drenched in dark humor: "Here's to the good days of a summer out west/Here's to Saint Anne who's gone mad..." Later St. Anne is "happily buzzing thru the dark sky..." or, you know, she's lost somewhere between the earth and her home...
Anyway, I've been thinking about this album in terms of the movie "I'm Not There": Carla's just enough of a cypher in her lyrics and projects such raw emotion on stage that I think a lot of people just read their own lives into her work. Like Todd Hayne's non-version of Dylan, Carla at times has meant different things to different groups of people: Ethyl Meatplow fans are stuck to their vision of her, Geraldine Fibbers fans are, too. I know that the words:
Stay inside my hands aren't fit to pray today.
Willing but unable to go out and play.
This is something pouring through me.
I close my eyes you come right to me...
... opens up a flood of personal memories and emotions that brings me close to tears when I hear them. But that's me. I don't really know what those words mean to the woman who wrote them.
But it doesn't matter. In this album there's lots of secrets. Secret notes. Written on skin. Tucked into teacups, folded up in that same little box inside. The whole last eleven minutes of drums and vocal evangelizing is about having things to be ashamed of and being judged by people who have vices that are just as bad. Which I think, brings me back to why I loved Carla from the first time I've heard her. The communal experience of Evangelista, or the Geraldine Fibbers, even Meatplow seems to be "it sucks and it hurts really bad, but, fuck it, it's sucks for all of us." She's just really good at catharsis.
So how does it sound? Pretty great... all over the place but surprisingly tight. I wondered about the forty seconds of noise starts the bouncy, trippy "Truth is Dark Like Outer Space" hearing it in advance online but in context of the album it acts as white noise just when you need to digest "The Blue Room" which is a masterpiece of controlled strings and subtly human vocal work. As the last bit of that song sinks in, the noise plays... and segues into this sorta teenage dance where bassist Tara Barnes and the guitars of Shahzad and Efrim come together. "The Blue Room" is preceded by a delicate string quartet piece that Carla doesn't perform on at all (she wrote and arranged it) that sets the whole four-track segment on its way. Another song "Smooth Jazz" masks Carla's screaming vocals with drums and more screams and it all works... you can see these people having fun figuring out how to throw in everything they can and make it work.
And then there's "Paper Kitten Claw" which is a baroque, theatrical, quiet piece where Barnes' bass line plays against Jessica Moss's violin and Nadia Moss's organ with Carla acting as another instrument, deadpanning "Every time you see the word never, you must cross it out." I don't get most of the lyrics, it seems to be about how you can take a little piece of everyone you experience and add it to your psyche, but it makes me feel happy and, ultimately, hopeful.
Hello Voyager can be ordered here and here. And downloaded here and here.
PS: A great line from the insane extended version of the lyrics to Hello Voyager that runs forever and ever on the little poster that comes with the CD: "this is me turning my head as the nazis coaxed nations to kill innocence forever and this is me flipping the remote between that and the simpsons' sonic youth episode"
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