The Fix

There’s something rather unsettling about The Evening Descends, the second release from Norman, Oklahoma-based Evangelicals. In fact, their music depends on it. The overkill of noise, reverberating multi-part harmonies, modulated instruments and sonic accidents is the unfortunate watermark. Lead singer Josh Jones has a voice that warbles, almost uncontrollably, as if he’s being poked with a Taser, stuck in the throes of an adolescent voice change, or being taken over by a spirit–or all of the above. The latter is the point, I think: beyond cobbling together a kind of freak-twee-prog, which is equal parts curious, whimsical, foreboding, and cute, Evangelicals transmit more than a little churchiness.

It’s definitely a bizarre sort of gospel, however, and conversion isn’t always easy. This is most clear in “Bellawood”, which at five and a half minutes, is the longest song on the album, its most ambitious–and at varying points, its most and least successful. It screeches in, on swampy horns, feedback, and buzzes, before a voice–Gomez from “The Addams Family”, no doubt—says urgently “They’re ganging up on me, what do I do?” The answer, “Run,” is almost overwhelmed because that’s what the music starts to do, howling and whirling, with gusty guitars, urgent drumming, and thunderous clashes made by hard-to-identify instruments. The refrain is Jones spelling “Bellawood,” with Evangelicals trademark overlapping background vocals chiming in like the choir at some junked-up, outer space, 21st century revival. The song keeps jostling back and forth between this spooky frenzy and its languid antithesis, making for a startling, sometimes electrifying, but more often schizophrenic offering. I find it a shorthand for the entire album: otherwise gorgeous moments spoiled by clutter. Beyond miscellany and trippy proselytizing, there’s no unifying thread to this album. Evangelicals are a concept band, for sure, but here they border on gimmick.