Prince of Truth

Carla Bozulich’s muse is deadly: with every release since 2006’s disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she’s since piloted, it’s assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year’s Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, finally collapsing into, the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich’s desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record’s production, at the band’s Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition; the sense of charged liminality; the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure; and the Gothic light and dark of that band’s best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich’s own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich’s singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on ‘I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice’ – a ballad that’s also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or ‘You Are A Jaguar’, an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich’s vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record’s end balances its opening: 10-minute closer ‘On The Captain’s Side’ slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.