{"id":156782,"date":"2025-06-04T06:27:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T06:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/156782\/"},"modified":"2025-06-04T06:27:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T06:27:09","slug":"yeule-evangelic-girl-is-a-gun-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/156782\/","title":{"rendered":"yeule: Evangelic Girl is a Gun Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been 30 years since Portishead<\/a>\u2019s Dummy<\/a> took home the Mercury Prize and cemented Bristol\u2019s trip-hop underground, but its woozy turntablism echoes across the pop spectrum today: the pitch-shifted melancholy of Sky Ferreira<\/a>, the bass-heavy brooding of a.s.o.<\/a>, the dreamy reverb of crushed<\/a>. The juxtapositions and subversions that made the genre groundbreaking at its inception still have an obvious appeal. Trip-hop\u2019s contrast of wistful vocals against steely, computerized rhythms is an easy aesthetic shorthand for nihilism, existentialism, and accelerationism. It\u2019s theoretically perfect, in other words, for sighing deeply while reminiscing about \u201cmorphine kissing\u201d and \u201cacid tripping,\u201d as yeule<\/a> does on their fourth album, Evangelic Girl is a Gun.<\/p>\n

yeule has wielded nostalgia as a weapon before: 2023\u2019s softscars<\/a> used the serrated edges of nu-metal and grunge to amplify their rage, and a year prior, Glitch Princess<\/a> incorporated shades of mid-2000s indie folk into its complex digital circuitry. Much of yeule\u2019s artistic output is preoccupied with dissociation and disconnection\u2014rotting, maiming, and otherwise escaping the flesh. Their strongest songs use nostalgia to ground that disembodiment in the undeniably human: the strikingly simple strum of an acoustic guitar on \u201cdazies,\u201d a bloodcurdling scream on \u201cx w x.\u201d But on Evangelic Girl is a Gun, yeule deflates much of what created that productive tension; these songs offer disappointingly little to differentiate themselves from their already heavily referenced source material.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Evangelic Girl is a Gun is a challenging listen\u2014the slow, shuffling rhythms and bluesy basslines on \u201cTequila Coma\u201d and \u201cWhat3vr\u201d will go down easy for fans of Moby<\/a> and Massive Attack<\/a>, while \u201cVV\u201d recalls the 2000s soft rock of Ingrid Michaelson and Natasha Bedingfield. With production from an illustrious group including A.G. Cook<\/a>, Clams Casino<\/a>, and Mura Masa<\/a>, the album sounds technically sharp, filled with small flourishes\u2014the click of a gun reloading on \u201cSaiko,\u201d the sound of a camera flash on \u201c1967.\u201d But it is, despite the suggestion of sex and violence in its marketing, ultimately tedious.<\/p>\n

At 31 minutes, Evangelic Girl is a Gun is the shortest record yeule has released, but repetitive choices make it feel far longer. A stifling, slow-moving beat seems to carry the first two songs forward at a morphiated drip. Moments on \u201cEko\u201d and \u201c1967\u201d that should feel climactic\u2014repeating the song\u2019s title as breakbeats ricochet, screaming about a lover going off to war\u2014are lost in the background, competing against a small army of vocal filters. \u201cSkullcrusher\u201d is perhaps the worst offender, so numbingly loud and slow it almost sounds as if it were accidentally exported at half speed. There is no emotional anchor here like the onslaught of \u201cdazies\u201d on softscars, nor a moment of differentiation like the shocking vulnerability of \u201cDon\u2019t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty\u201d on Glitch Princess. Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been 30 years since Portishead\u2019s Dummy took home the Mercury Prize and cemented Bristol\u2019s trip-hop underground, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-156782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114623679564367625","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}