Long before the video for "Midnight Vignette" confirmed Evangelicals' love for the grotesque imagery of low-budget slasher films and old horror comics, the song sounded like a synthesis of those influences. Combining equal parts David Bowie, T. Rex, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Evangelicals' members play atmospheric indie glam-rock marked by insanely infectious hooks.
The Oklahoma band's second album, The Evening Descends, is a hallucinatory collage of pulsating synthesizers, soaring guitar lines, and hollow voices awash in effects. But underneath all that, the inventive likes of "Midnight Vignette" contain carefully interwoven melodies that reveal themes of fear and heartbreak. As singer Josh Jones hits his woozy and warbling chorus — "So please don't tell my mother, she wouldn't want to know / that I've been going crazy right outside her door" — his brooding devolves all the way into madness. And yet the song perfectly marries those moods with moments of catharsis that wash away the angst in an instant.
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