If I could cry cry cry, I'd be swimming...

So alive and evocative is Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista (already available in the UK and Canada, released in the US and elsewhere June 6), that the listener is literally pulled into it mid-breath. A string quartet and an organist are working together to create one singular sound that feels like lungs are at work, compressing and decompressing. By the way, we’re in a church. It doesn’t matter that the recording was done at Hotel2Tango, the notoriously grimy space made famous by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. As if orchestrating an old radio program, co-producers Bozulich and Shahzad Ismaily have opened the creaky cathedral doors and cranked up the organ pipes. There’s a continuous banging suggesting the sound, to me of kneelers crashing to the ground, ghostly revelers rising with the spirit. But what Ms. Bozulich taps into when she begins to sing and preach isn’t hell and punishment, and there’s no accident in the fact that few of the musicians in the opening epic are men, and that this is Evangelista, and not evangelist. There’s no fire and brimstone. In fact there’s “fire and mercy.” In an age where spirituality is used from Bob Jones University to the teachings of the Taliban as a way to remind people to shrug off the injustices done to them in the hope of a next world, and where scripture is used as a catalyst for division and hate, Bozulich is screaming love. Where the same killer voice was once used to decry the dead ends of despair in the best songs of the Geraldine Fibbers, it now cries in desperation to bring hope. “Swing to me with your heart shot up with lies. Swing to me! Shut your salty eyes! Swing to me where nothing was ever true! Swing to me! You! And you! And YOU!” Meanwhile, in the background Elder Otis Jones preaches to a congregation in 1936 as a spirit, marrying the evangelista of the 21st century to the evangelist of the African American congregation of the turn of the last century; their voices married in an understanding that the poor in spirit need comfort, not condemnation. In the song that follows, Carla vocalizes with herself on a beautiful rendition of the spiritual "Steal Away" but she leaves out the word Jesus. Scriptural Jesus would be proud of what she has to say, but as a statement on her website states, this is even for those who believe in nothing. Noone's pushed away from the table.