Evangelicals - 'The Evening Descends' (Dead Oceans) Released 04/02/08

If Thom Yorke upped sticks and took a job with Alec Ounsworth’s alt-rocking optimists Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Oklahoma’s Evangelicals would be the result. Except they’d all have to live in space, and eat spaghetti with weights attached to it so it didn’t fly away. Evangelicals take the ‘alt’ from CYHSY’s alt-rock mantle and piss all over it. Such is their weirdness. Stringy guitar roped round soft drumming and 24-year-old Josh Jones’ (mastermind, vocalist) flexible exhalations are the threads combining eleven mellow epics. Evangelicals come from the same place as The Flaming Lips, Starlight Mints and Chainsaw Kittens: eccentrics each and every one. Maybe it’s an Olympia, Manchester, New York thing. All the bands grow up listening to each other, watching each other, talking to each other, so they all grow up… strange.

‘The Evening Descends’ is Evangelicals’ second record, after 2006’s ‘So Gone’ got them noticed with classy production and songs about mental breakdown. And they’re a polished lot. ‘Party Crashin’ reflects some serious time in the studio, not a dedication like CYHSY’s to never sign a record deal. It shines, shimmers and takes off at the four-minute forty second mark. Jones’ voice transcending that of Yorke, let alone Ounsworth, to create an (wait for it) evangelical atmosphere. Dramatic and explosive.

They’re not religious, research shows. But interested in the zealousness evangelism invokes. They’re keeno’s. And why not? A man’s gotta have a hobby. ‘Snowflakes’ is very OK Computer era Radiohead, but from Oklahoma. So it’s pretty and floaty, but cosmic. Wayne Coyne would be proud. “Snowflakes floating from the sky, they keep of falling,” Jones dictates. He’s capturing a moment, and the music reflects the flakes arching, steady fall to the ground - much more serene than a mental breakdown.

And don’t knock their imagination. ‘How Do You Sleep?” employs keyboards more than anything, under Jones’ exclaiming “Holy shit!” and shouting “Can you see?/Is this really happening?” And the guitar solo in ‘Bellawood’ cranks as it like Matt Bellamy on a magic carpet, while “Strange things keep happening,” Jones admits. “There’s a monster growing inside of you, I can see.” Maybe his grip on reality isn’t so solid after all.

But who needs reality, reality sucks. Anyone showing us a new way to live must be heralded – musicians, philosophers, artists. Cope with Yorke and Ounsworth comparisons, and ‘The Evening Descends’ is as listenable to as Tom Cruise rambling on about Scientology. Very. Only it makes a lot more sense.