When I first heard Evangelicals’ sophomore release The Evening Descends in December of 2007, it sounded like the second coming of Arcade Fire. To my ears, it was the only album since Funeral capable of matching its intensity without sounding like a canned attempt at doing so. It brought Graham Parsons and Beethoven to mind in equal measure; it was marked by thematic cohesiveness, lyrical depth and an epicness that most other swing-for-the-fences-type indie acts come embarrassingly short of achieving. It had moments you just couldn’t totally shake: the opening bass line of “Skeleton Man;” the anguished, wailing coda to “Party Crashing,” the bitingly hilarious and totally unexpected satire of the “blind leading the blind” parable from the New Testament at the tail-end of “Bloodstream.” And I could go on like this.
That Evangelicals’ first visit to New York in over a year took place at Union Hall instead of say, Bowery Ballroom exposes the indie hype machine as something other than a means of vetting and rewarding up-and-coming musical talent. It was hard to avoid this conclusion after one of the more mind-wrecking hours of music I’ve experienced this year: Josh Jones’s Buckley-meets-a-sheet-of-acid-tabs-like voice loses none of its clarity or versatility in a live setting, and the sonic limitations of a small club didn’t prevent a song like “Party Crashing” from sounding just impossibly gigantic, like the work of a band trying to pulverizing the venue’s sound system as well as everything within earshot, and, improbably, succeeding at it. While a couple of new songs didn’t measure up to the stuff they played from Evening, it sounds like their next album will be another acid-washed psyche-country gem. Here’s hoping everyone pays attention the next time around.
Opener Holiday Shores is another band that deserves your giving a shit. Like Evangelicals, the Shores traffic in synthed-out deconstructed country rock—a cover of the Byrd's cover of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" was a good demonstration of where their hearts lie. But they have a jammier, instrumental side to them that meshes well with their catchy songwriting, and that plays incredibly well in a live setting.
Photo by www.flickr.com/photos/sammich/
Jonny Leather
