Orignially published by Cluster, written by Graeme Thomson

Oh Guy, how right you were. We live in a topsy-turvy world where the true is a moment of the false. Or forty-five minutes in the case of Carla Bozulich, who wakes me from a deep, sunken reverie as she pauses in her set to ask the time from somebody in the audience, lowering by several notches a voice that could, without need of a glass of water, swallow the entire city. “We’ve got time for one or two more songs. We have to stop at 8.45”. At which point I’m asking myself why there isn’t a riot, why people aren’t ripping the seats out of the theatre, taking the management of Café de la danse hostage, blocking the members of Why?

– who it now begins to dawn on me are considered by many here to be tonight’s main event – in their dressing room until they agree to come to reason, hang up their instruments and let Carla and the magnificent post-everything wrecking crew Evangelista rage on until the walls fall down, until the blood of risk managers and venture capitalists runs in the streets, until judgement break excellent and fair. But in the absence of such a response or even the mildest rumblings of protest, I’ll stick with my admittedly skewed vision of the objective historical situation of the pop hierarchy and dispense in a couple of lines with the “stars” of tonight’s show, Anticon-hothoused indie-rock offshoots,Why? (why indeed?) who sound like the regrettable result of what would happen if Animal Collective and 80s minor irritants They Might Be Giants got together to record a Smiths tribute album, so I can focus the body of the review on the magnificent ‘support’ act who begin tonight with the intricate sonic Wunderkammer of crazed cross-wiring that is ‘Nels’ Box’ where Bozulich’s eerily operatic vocal smears flicker forlornly amid tides of bakelite crackle and dead radio scree, and then segue neatly into ‘Pissing’, an ominous slow chug down a one-way highway to screeching emotional pile-up. Fusing brooding strings and free improv’s extended techniques with post-noise pedal-board genuflection, bombed-out organ and ghostly smatterings of laptop ambience, Bozulich has with just two albums, 2005’s blowtorch confessional Evangelista and now (as Evangelista) Hello, Voyager forged a worthy hymnal for the current electronic dark-age climate of networked fear and paranoia. Harried by this evening’s frankly absurd time constraints she and her formidable band sweep from the distant dismal bell-clang that heralds the doomy sermon of ‘Winds of St Anne’s’ with its desolate ‘here’s to the good days and bad’ refrain via the barely suppressed ticking vehemence of ‘Paper Kitten Claw’ and the disquieting ambiguity of its flatly voiced instruction: ‘Every time you see the word “never”, you must cross it out’ to a tumultuous concluding ‘Hello Voyager’, a slo-mo demolition gospel amid the ‘blood and rubble’ of the new century’s infancy which sees Bozulich as a demented majorette banging on a frame drum, skipping back and forth across the stage while Tara Barnes’s bass buzzes and stutters in the background like a dying fly. Sadly there’s no time to road-test the new album’s more surprising moves such as the brisk, non-nonsense post-skronk hit-and-run of ‘Truth is Dark Like Outer Space’ or the jaded delinquent strut of ‘Lucky Lucky Luck’. But even if tonight the voyage feels a bit on the short side, it’s clear that this ship is rigged for a long journey.