After I listened to The Evening Descends a few times, I thought about what an Evangelicals show must be like and decided I would probably be down for that. The album is sprawling and imaginative, and I imagined it would be a pretty big show.

When I saw Evangelicals listed on an upcoming bill, I was confused. Not only were they playing at a very small venue (the Hemlock), but they were the first of three bands, and I hadn’t heard of the other two. I even double- and triple-checked to make sure that the venue wasn’t mistakenly linking to the popular band when in reality some other Evangelicals was playing.

Anyways, so the show was small, and not a big production number, but that ended up making it better than I expected. There was something invigorating about watching these four young Oklahomans rocking the small-scale craziness in their own little cloud of stage fog and blacklight.

There might be a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is other than that Tony B books rad shows at the Hemlock. And Skeleton Man is one of the great singles of 2008.

Evangelicals - Skeleton Man from The Evening Descends (insound / amazon CD / amazon mp3 / itunes)

http://www.myspace.com/evangelicals

[photo by jasong106]