Oklahoma is not widely known for churning out scads of high quality bands, but when the Sooner State contributes, it contributes big, and it contributes quirky. Like the Flaming Lips and The Starlight Mints before them, Evangelicals have emerged triumphantly from Oklahoma with The Evening Descends, their rather brilliant sophomore effort.

The wild ride commences with the title track, where in the first thirty seconds alone we hear the short trill of a harp, a sampled voice speaking in time with a snare drum, a brief conversation between a man and a woman, and singer Josh Jones’ airy falsetto intoning ‘Evangelicals’. The song displays its schizophrenic nature with the sometimes ethereal, sometimes stilted layering of vocals and instruments. The listener is also introduced to one of the underlying themes of the album - the desperation of the narrator: “I open my eyes in the night, and I search for my hand in the dark, and I can’t see a thing at all, and I don’t think you even care.” The track ends with that same harp trill, and ladies and gentlemen: we’re off. ‘Midnight Vignette’ perpetuates the album’s multiple personality disorder with relatively playful bass and guitar riffs and hand claps dueling with the eeriness cast by synthesizers, bells and reverb. The possible madness of the narrator emerges on ‘Skeleton Man’ where the steady drums, intermittent bursts of guitar and crescendoing synthesizer explode into maniacal laughter, frenetic guitar and Jones’ demented cry of “Someone loves you very much, someone loves you very much, you’re fucked”.

The cornerstone of The Evening Descends is the excellent ‘Party Crashin’, a story played out not only with Jones’ falsetto, but also by way of snippets of conversation between a doctor and a car crash victim. In a prime example of what Evangelicals achieved so successfully on this album, fuzz and distortion vie throughout with an almost lilting guitar melody, creating a feeling that the song is held together by a tenuous thread and threatening to explode into a million pieces at any moment. The band’s sensitive side is revealed in the waltzy ‘Snowflakes’ where the lovely music exemplifies the tranquility that a snowstorm can bring. Yet still present is the underlying loneliness and desperation of the narrator: “The snowflakes keep tumbling and I can’t help wondering why things just keep getting buried”.

The album takes an inexplicably seamless turn from ‘Snowflakes’ to the completely unhinged one-two punch that is ‘How Do You Sleep?’ and ‘Bellawood’. The latter portrays Jones at his most demented - quite fitting, as the song is about a mental institution, although it wouldn’t be out of place as the soundtrack of a really good haunted house. Evangelicals use samples of B-grade horror films, violins, organs, and a synth disguised as a musical saw to create a spooky atmosphere until at last the song melts into complete madness with Jones yelping over and over “Strange things keep happening, all around my head, strange things keep happening!”

The album’s one lowlight is ‘Here In The Deadlights’. Sure, the title is a clever play on words, but the song lacks the imagination shown on the rest of the album. “Bloodstream”, on the other hand, is spaced-out psych pop at its best, and thankfully pulls the listener back in and allows the album to go out maybe not with a bang, but on a definite high note. I don’t believe it was written as a concept album, but with its thematic consistency, both lyrically and musically, The Evening Descends comes off as just that. It’s a crazy journey through madness, nightmares and loneliness, vocal sampling, synthesizers, distortion, and lots and lots of reverb. Even the artwork plays into the concept album theory, unsettling though it may be, it successfully embraces the feel of the album. So, if you like a lot of psych in your pop and a bit of freak in your folk, check out Evangelicals. You won’t be disappointed.
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mp3:> Evangelicals - Skeleton Man

Links
Evangelicals [myspace] [label] [buy it]

Evangelicals - The Evening Descends