33. Evangelista

Originally published in the university newspaper, The Boar.

Evangelista – Prince of Truth (Constellation)

Carla Bozulich's muse is deadly: with every release since 2006's disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she's since piloted, it's assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year's Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, in ragged structures fringed with noise, finally collapsing into the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich's desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record's production, at the band's Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition, the sense of charged liminality, the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure, and the Gothic light and dark of that band's best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich's own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich's singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on 'I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice' – a ballad that's also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or 'You Are A Jaguar', an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich's vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record's end balances its opening: 10-minute closer 'On The Captain's Side' slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.

32. Flaming Lips

Published in The Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper, Vol. 33 Iss. 3.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Brothers)

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips' latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, but neither is it a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997's 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open 'Convinced of the Hex', immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs 'Aquarius Sabotage', 'Worm Mountain', like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of 'Evil', 'I Can Be A Frog's whimsical jaunt, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, 'Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast' like a gathering of Eno's Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne's vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) 'The Impulse' might as well be Jeff Lynne on 'Mr. Blue Sky'; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on 'Sagittarius Silver Announcement' is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part-in-the-red studio-jam, part-interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer 'Watch The Planets', you've no choice but to take them at their word: it's cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment the Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on yr tongue.