Evangelicals The Evening Descends by: Alex De Petro Tue:05-Feb-08 Label: Dead Oceans Year: 2008 WB rating 51 out of 100

Continuing from their debut album So Gone, the new offering from Oklahoma trio Evangelicals, The Evening Descends, is a swirling milieu of ambient indie rock and falsetto driven vocal soundscapes which shifts seamlessly from attempted-minimalism to faux-bombastic ardor and back again at the drop of a hat.

The two key aspects of the album are the chiming, flowing guitar stylings and vocal acrobatics of front man Josh Jones, able to change from joyous bleating to wafer-thin poetry without a hitch. However these two features often seem at odds with each other, competing for the attention of the listener. Contrary to traditional rock music the album is driven by Jones’ guitar work rather than the rhythm section, which, on the whole is rather weak and typical, the exception to this being the Arcade Fire-esque use of timpani on ‘Stoned Again’. This timpani serves to ground the floating, sky-high vocals superbly, providing one of the best tracks on the album.

The musicality of the band’s guitarists is excellent though, and to Jones’ credit this does keep the tracks fresh. His playing is varied, with a range of techniques such as the harp-like picking of the eponymous track, the scales and arpeggio of ‘Party Crashin’ and good old fashioned Revolution-chic distortion in ‘Bellawood’. This is offset, however, by the somewhat erroneous use of synthesizers throughout the album, which could be described as fumbling at best and completely futile at worst, only serving to detract (and further confuse) the positive elements.

In the latter part of the album there are attempts at drama and theatricality as the pace quickens and the vocals become hurried and urgent. Yet this ends up sounding contrived and sincerely immature; the music, despite the tempo push, is mostly similar to that of the early part of the album, its tone forcibly changed by the vocals and the introduction of a selection of giddy sound bytes, such as dogs barking, audiences clapping and lines from movies and television shows. Perhaps if The Evening Descends was written more as a true concept album, and these ideas explored in full, the desired effect would have been achieved, but as it stands it really serves only as a distraction, and a frivolous one at that.

Despite having some virtues, The Evening Descends is not an original or unique album. The energetic tracks are rendered more powerfully on any Polyphonic Spree album, the Flaming Lips produce more strange and progressive rock tunes based around vaguely melodic yelling, and Queen were sampling B-Grade movies in 1975. By the end of the first spin of the album, there’s a real feel that you’ve heard it all before, and in that respect it really is ‘just another indie release’, words which no band want to hear, and no journalist wants to write.