The Evening Descends

tumbling scales, fearless skyscraping howls, cavernous echo, beautiful insane meanderings: all this is contained on the evangelicals sophomore album, 'the evening descends.' the psych-poppers garnered great reviews for their debut 'so gone', but this effort goes deeper into whatever strange inner space these weird boys inhabit. there's some of syd barrett's whimsical free-association, a lot of brian wilson's harmonic aerobatics and some of the keening wildness and proggy display of the mars volta. there are songs about mental institutions and songs about suicide, yet the music is lit up by love. the mood strobes between a child's nightmare, a 50s b-movie by ed wood and a blissful summer picnic by a sunlit river. most beguiling of all is this band's bright-eyed, desperate charm, which makes up in crazy romance what it lacks in coherence. although there's not a tune you could whistle, this music is infested with melody - energetic, attention-deficient scraps and themes which jump up and flap wildly round your head before spontaneously bursting into flames and falling to the ground like paper aeroplanes. most memorable are the single 'skeleton man' and 'party crashin', a psychedelic freakout which seems to be about a drug-induced car accident. repeated listenings also bring out the insane brilliance of bellawood ('strange things keep happening') the dreamy, cascading 'snowflakes' and the brooding, almost sexy 'here in the deadlights'. on dead oceans.