Free Music Monday: Evangelista "Artificial Lamb"

Like her previous LPs as Evangelista, the September-due In Animal Tongue finds Carla Bozulich voyaging deep into the darkness, fearless charting the frightening unknown. And the unknown resounds throughout "Artificial Lamb," an endlessly-evocative tone-poem whose proud lyrical poetry remains, no matter how often I peer into its shadows, elusive and inscrutable.

In its rich imagery of eyes and hands, people and animals, the physical and the mechanical, Bozulich riffs viciously; her peerless voice keening over repetitious guitar figures, with barely a beat of percussion in earshot. "Oh darling, oh darling dear," she carols, in an intimate refrain; as her song seems like a lament for... a dying Earth? A dead career? The bitter end of a drunken spiral? A broken-down body? A broken mechanical sheep, dreamt of by a sentimental robot?

"Oh, darling dear, oh, darling dear/I'll be hiding inside until the Earth disappears," Bozulich wails, "look in my cracked eye, you'll see planets!" And, peering into "Artificial Lamb," you see whole worlds in song; whole narratives waiting to swallow you up. It's one of the best things Bozulich has ever done, and she's done a lot of good things.

Evangelista "Artificial Lamb"

Photo © LissaIvy Tiegel