Evangelicals on Myspace

MP3: Stoned Again (from The Evening Descends)

MP3: The Last Christmas On Earth (from Mistletonia)

Video by Matt Leach: Another Day

The Evening Descends… and worlds collide. First you hear the prodigious musical skill: the deft guitar work, the clever pop sensibility, the wild arrangements. But then on other end of the spectrum there is the innocent and youthful charm of a quartet of lost boys who seem to have no business making music with such maturity and sophistication. Taken together, you have Evangelicals, a wholly demented ensemble from Norman, Oklahoma. Expect tales of religion and revivalism, plus insanity, drugs, black-outs, zombies, good and evil, car crashes, love, and a mental institution called Bellawood. Dabbling in glam, slipping in a little funk and soul, drinking the psychedelic Kool-aid, blasting the synths, cranking up the guitars, and wrapping it all up with a dose of pop smarts, The Evening Descends is the first great album of 2008.

From Inpress magazine:

Beat review:

From Rave Magazine Brisbane:

The nutters have overrun the asylum! Wait, now they’re writing songs… actually that’s good stuff

As those penetrating and fear-filled eyes on the album cover stare back at me, my initial reaction is ‘Wow, horror-metal, they’ve really picked the right guy to review this one’. Thankfully my first impressions are generally miles off, as The Evening Descends is a different beast altogether. The album opening title-track jumps between freefloating snippets of vocals and dance-friendly glitch-pop, complete with fingerclicks and mounds of keyboards. Maybe they were exposed to something traumatic in their youth, perhaps they’re actually old acid casualties, but Evangelicals seem to be a band that’s at least one chapter short of a whole book. And it’s not ‘oh, look how zany we are! This guy has funny coloured hair, I have a Care Bears T-shirt! WACKYYY!!!!’. No, think somewhere along the lines of Soft Bulletin-era Flaming Lips, combined with incorrectly prescribed psychotropic drugs for a more apt description of their weirdness. The wailing vocals of guitarist/songwriter Josh Jones even manage a pretty good update of Mr Coyne’s high-pitched croon. The middle trio of Party Crashin’, Snowflakes and How Do You Sleep? are definitely to be heard back to back, moving from new wave joy to forlorn balladry (with bittersweet ambient keys and echo-drenched vocals, of course) to climactic Arcade Fire-type bombast. I’ve mentioned too many bands here, but there’s plenty of stuff Evangelicals can claim as their own on their sophomore effort. Jones later chants in Bellawood, the group’s tale of an extended stay in a mental asylum, Strange things keep happening / all around my head. If this is true, the man should keep sharing these strange things with the rest of us.

MITCH ALEXANDER

Reviews for So Gone:

From “The Age” Entertainment Guide, Jan 5 2007:

Don’t mistake the album title as a clue. On a first listen, you’re tempted to wonder what on earth these three young guys calling themselves Evangelicals were on when they recorded their debut album, So Gone. All sorts of shapes and colours chase across So Gone, but its prime suit is sweetly crafted psychedelic pop.

Evangelicals hail from Oklahoma, birthplace of the Flaming Lips; maybe it’s one of the most fun places in the world to make music, because there is a wide-eyed glee in the music of both bands. And a similar disregard for convention.

On So Gone, anything goes, often simultaneously, but without sounding crude or messy; every gatecrashing squall, whirr, madman holler and guitar stutter somehow makes itself right at home alongside grimy electronic signals, watery vibraphone, gorgeous harmonies, cheeky banjo and the naive, high vocal of singer-guitarist Josh Jones.

Standouts include the careening, layered Another Day (and Yoor Still Knocked Out), the deliriously joyous Here Comes Trouble, and the breezy, carefree Diving. Maybe the album title refers to how you’ll feel after hearing So Gone. I am.

- Jo Roberts
From Rolling Stone Australia, January 2007:

Trio channel fellow Oklahoma stars, the Flaming Lips.

WITH PSYCHEDELIC POP TONES that draw comparisons to the Flaming Lips, and a ramshackle approach to song structure that allows catchy hooks, freeform expressionism, country edges and ’60s airiness to coexist peacefully, the debut for this Oklahoma trio has enough exuberant appeal to excuse its flat spots (the lilting, hallucinogenic “My Headache”, the general aimlessness of “Into the Woods”). A band for just a year, Evangelicals cobbled these tracks together on various 4-tracks and bad computers, explaining the freshness and carefree lack of cohesion. The band, though, are at their best when they explore songs rather than just sounds, as they do on “What An Actress Does Best”, which builds from a twee indie base with a vaguely Latin feel into an acid-rock workout led by dirty organ and screaming lysergic guitar.

LUKE ANISIMOFF

From The Brag - CD of the Week review:

A record will come along sometimes that is so fresh that one doesn’t want to weigh it down with any sort of genre or classification. Such is the case with Oklahoma’s most exiting new trio, Evangelicals. Their debut album is filled with a charisma that is particularly unique.

The music is many things but an unbridled sense of freedom is what seems to characterise it most. The band will change tempos many times throughout a song and the vocals are summery and carefree, at times confused but never remotely self-conscious. Hello Jenn, I’m A Mess sounds like a circus ride that’s spinning out of control but it’s not dangerous .. it’s glorious. The instruments on the record run around each other like children; they’re relaxed, having fun and there’s something tremendously pure about their interaction.

Even kids need their downtime and tracks such as My Headache and Into the Woods are mellow, melodic and quite magnificent. There is a gorgeous guitar solo on the former amidst the blissfully relaxed vocals while the Woods provides subtle beats and xylophonic dreams.

There’s something new in every track, from salsa groove in the base to more free-wheeling rock celebrations. What is particularly striking is the melancholy nature of the final offering The Water is Warm. It’s as though the band is saying goodbye to their own album. A sad farewell but a necessary one.

No more words. Just listen..

- Andrew Seccombe

From InPress magazine, December 15 2007:

So Gone is the debut record from Oklahoma trio Evangelicals, and it’s been causing quite a fuss in indie circles in the band’s native land. And rightly so - this is a RIOT of an album.

It sounds like the band — singer and mainman Josh Jones, along with cohorts Austin Stephens and Kyle Davis — have used the opportunity to make a record to commit every scrap of material they’ve ever written to tape, and then slapped them together into the form of ten songs. This isn’t a criticism — although such an album could certainly have resulted in an unformed mess of half-baked concepts, somehow So Gone works. The result is a record that’s fairly bursting with imagination and ideas.

So Gone is indie pop at its most joyous and exuberant — without so much as a nod to restraint, the album lurches wildly and breathlessly through a kaleidoscope of styles and sounds. Describing something as a “rollercoaster ride” has become a horribly hackneyed cliche, but still, it’s not a bad analogy for this album. So Gone has a similarly disorienting effect to one of those rollercoasters when you’re shot down some horrendously steep slope, slowed, accelerated, slowed, and shot off again — one moment there are synthesisers howling, the next minute melody is picking its way delicately through a curtain of cascading, crystalline guitar arpeggios — and then the fuzzbox kicks in and the madness starts again.

It all makes for a wild, entertaining ride. Curmudgeons might still dismiss it as unfocused or self-indulgent, but that’d rather miss the point — at first listen, it’s all a bit overwhelming, but the more you listen to this, the more you come to realise that behind the initial exuberance, this is a collection of well-crafted and clever songs. In any case, only a hard heart could fail to get caught up in the sheer exhilaration of it all. An audacious, infectious debut.

- Tom Hawking

From Beat magazine, Nov 8 2006:

Norman, Oklahoma lacks the genealogical credibility and currency of Los Angeles, California, New York, New York, Austin, Texas, Chicago, Illinois or Detroit, Michigan. Oklahoma is best known in musical circles for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical of the same name; despite being the third largest city in Oklahoma (and a college town), Norman doesn’t (superficially, at least) exude the type of charm and vibrancy you’d ordinarily associate with pop music.

But if you have to think of the sort of pop music that would come from a place called Norman, Oklahoma it’d be the Evangelicals. The band’s name is only partly a misnomer .. while the Evangelicals aren’t part of an outer suburban revivalist movement, the band is actively preaching the message of the sanctity and artistic elasticity of pop music. In that projected context maybe the collage of weird electronic sounds comprising the opening track, A Mouthful of Skeletons, is an exorcism of all that’s evil in pop music, before Evangelicals appear at the pulpit to articulate its message. The succeeding tracks, led by the fresh and organic pop of Another Day (with its concertina tempo), rarely stray from message, delivered in haunting falsetto tones by Evangelicals founder Josh Jones (hopefully no relation to the late Jim).

Diving has the saccharine sweet qualities of the Partridge Family and the pop brilliance of early Cat Stevens and Hello Jenn is a romantic lament that’s either touching, or the subject of a court-issued restraining order. If Here Comes Trouble is a perfectly crafted recipe for surf-side prozac happiness (a recipe that finds itself electronically augmented later in the album on Goin Down), My Headache (with its psychedelic Jeff Buckley wash) suggests the type of psychological turmoil that frequently breeds quality art. The sense of melancholy is ephemeral .. What an Actress skips along with child-like innocence, before deviating down a lane lined with rich and growling glam rock explosions.

Yet maybe the band’s secular pop spiritualism is best reflected on the moving concluding track, The Water’s Warm. The world .. political, social and pop .. has its deeply ingrained imperfections, but at the end of the day the water’s warm enough to still wade in and enjoy.

- Patrick Emery