EVANGELISTA
With The Scenics. Sun, Apr 13. The Horseshoe Tavern, 370 Queen W. $13 from Rotate This, Ticketweb.ca, Circus Books & Music, Horseshoe front bar; $15 door. Doors 8pm.
Carla Bozulich is no preacher, but there couldn’t be a more appropriate moniker for her loose collective of co-conspirators than Evangelista. Taken from the title of their first record together — released in 2006 under Bozulich’s own name — and not the supermodel, Evangelista elicits the religiosity of all-consuming conviction. But channelled through the post-punk sensibility of the former Geraldine Fibbers and Ethyl Meatplow frontwoman, it’s a defiant spirit that draws on the seemingly lost art of punk poetics à la Lydia Lunch and Family Man–era Henry Rollins.
The intensity of their recent release Hello, Voyager feeds on the extremes of Bozulich’s vocal talents — the bleak articulation of “Paper Kitten Claw” and lush sensitivity of “The Blue Room” only serve to amplify the crashing percussion on “Smooth Jazz” and the speaker-shredding “Truth is Dark like Outer Space.” With a voice that resembles Patti Smith’s howls juxtaposed against country-tinged melancholy, Bozulich commands her impressive range like a woman possessed.
Speaking with Bozulich on the phone from Portland, I ask about the flailing, instrument-dragging and general recklessness of the footage I’ve seen from her recent SXSW showcase. She chuckles to herself.
“It’s so funny you should ask that because I’m lying in bed at my friend’s house and I’m just trying to decide exactly how I’m going to address the sheer physical pain in my body.” It seems the previous evening’s performance included accidentally smacking her knee with a drumstick, which only serves to accentuate her tendency towards engaging an uninspired audience by “sort of hurling myself at them.”
However, as she points out, the physicality is not some kind of spiritual release at all. If Bozulich is channelling anything in Evangelista, it’s the entirety of her own career. “I feel like I just made a decision to not water myself down,” she says of her raw-powered delivery. “I always felt that my music was really polarizing. I have a really strong voice and it put a lot of people off sometimes. And I [thought], well what would it be like if I just used everything I have and just didn’t hold back? Like I said, I’ve really been using my body every night and really throwing it around and trying to make it all turn inside out and see what’s inside.”
This is a remarkably confident statement from someone who dove into instrumental music about a decade ago, forming Scarnella with Nels Cline at the conclusion of her Fibbers tenure because she was wary of her presence as a frontwoman. “I didn’t want to be this female frontperson thing for a while,” she says. By returning to that role 10 years on, she has no illusions about the influence of sexuality on concertgoers. “There’s a certain audience,” she says, “who would never come and see me now because I’m 42. I’m not a birthday cake that’s being served up.”
Consequently, the Evangelista herself has not only transcended her own persona, but also infused it with the urgency of something far more personal. “On the first Evangelista album, my whole life was changing at that time, and really dramatically, every detail of my life was up in the air,” she says. But with the help of some Montreal musicians — namely a few members of the godspeed you! black emperor/Thee Silver Mt Zion collective — Evangelista, her first solo album proper, played like a nine-song guide on how to survive being hit by lightning, to borrow one of the song titles. “On both of these albums I was trying to convey a feeling of hope,” she adds. And it’s a sentiment most fully realized in Hello, Voyager’s title track.
Expanding upon its already extensive lyrical subtext celebrating the joy of Armageddon, Bozulich launches into a five-minute monologue: “We refuse to give in to this concept of being separate and disconnected and protecting our own little tiny island, and we look around and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been burned. I’ve done bad things. I’ve made stupid mistakes. I was naïve. Now I know more. But I don’t want to let go of the gentleness and the innocence of being naïve. I’m not jaded. Fuck you. I still have love and I’m gonna fucking wield it.’”
Can I get an amen?