Austinist CD Review: The Evangelicals' So Gone

You don't take care of your CDs very well. Your car—probably a mid-nineties Honda Civic with hit-or-miss air conditioning—is littered with albums, sans jewel cases. On this particular, hypothetical afternoon, you find that five discs have melted together whilst carelessly stacked in your center console: My Morning Jacket's Z, The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, Broken Social Scene's Broken Social Scene, Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, and anything from any labeled band out of Athens, Georgia. Defying the laws of thermodynamics and common sense, this amalgam has produced a single, playable disc. Sloughing off the residual plastic like extra cookie dough, you read the title: The Evangelicals, So Gone.

Upon first listen, one may experience some side effects, among which are dizziness, disorientation, and gratuitous comparisons. Considering that the band only has three members, this album's sonic expansiveness is either due to go-for-broke studio noodling or a god-like instrumental industriousness that has no immediate equal (find out for yourself next Tuesday at Emo's). It is this same musical opacity that will probably drive some less adventurous listeners to press eject before they careen their Civcs into an oncoming vehicle.

The first proper song, "Another Day (And Yoor Still Knocked Out)," could easily be a bootleg from an early nineties Flaming Lips concert, complete with vocals that sound like they were recorded in a gigantic bathroom. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The engineering of this record is almost as confounding as the songs themselves. Random sound effects pepper the material, enhancing what is a singular experience. There are welcome moments of calm, such as in "Diving," that let you catch your breath. Steel yourself for the rest of the disc, though: bass lines and impossibly long guitar riffage animatedly engage each other, all the while framing frenetic percussion. Tempos oscillate, keyboards tinkle, and reverb runs amok like an unmedicated child.

For better or worse, this album turns its nose up at consistency. Each song is a meteor shower of melodies and structural abnormalities. By the time you reach the sublime "The Water is Warm," and a truce is proposed to your neurons, you'll wonder what happened to the last forty minutes of your life. Fortunately for the Evangelicals, you'll happily start the album over and listen again to find out. We just did.

Evangelicals perform at Emo's next Tuesday, June 20th, with the Lovely Feathers and Man Man.