Jennifer Kitner
“Let It Roll” is the opening song on Quieter, the forthcoming album by Carla Bozulich that features a collection of previously unreleased collaborative tracks curated by Carla and culled from her recent archives.
In the album’s liner notes, Carla calls this song “the most honest work I’ve ever done” – we’d best take her at her word and listen up, given the context of a long, storied, uncompromising career making so much tremendous and unflinchingly honest music under her own name, in her Evangelista project, or heading up prior groups as diverse and devastating as The Geraldine Fibbers, Ethyl Meatplow and Scarnella.
“Let It Roll” earns its place in the fine tradition of songs that stare deeply into the abyss and extract redemptive perseverance therefrom. No facile goth darkness, no borrowed blues, nothing remotely caricatured here – but a salient reminder of why Bozulich’s widely acclaimed 2014 opus Boy drew such substantive comparisons to her more firmly canonised fellow travellers. As The Sunday Times wrote in its review: “If Boy emerged from the oeuvre of a broadsheet-friendly icon such as Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Tom Waits it would be lauded as an uncompromising work of genius.”
“Let It Roll” dates back to these Boy sessions – too loaded and intense for Bozulich to let it roll out into the world at the time. But now? Fuck the world. Let it roll indeed.
Carla: “I think we wrote it while cat sitting for Father Murphy in Treviso, Italy. I don’t remember being sad at the time. This is surely a song far beyond sadness. We bundle together and stay…”
“Let It Roll” features Bozulich on bass and vocals, with longtime collaborators Andrea Belfi on drums and Jhno (John Eichenseer) on everything else. Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and Soundcloud.
The album shall be released through Constellation Records on the 11th of May.
RIYL: Circuit Des Yeux, Jenny Hval, Grouper, Noveller, Pharmakon, Julianna Barwick
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