Evangeline's Wistful Indie Pop Comes Into Focus in 'Fuzzy'
Good music is fuzzy, hard to discern until it lands softly. I wanted to gift a paraprosdokian to a fellow writer, but failing that, I want to make clear how wondrously illuminating this debut EP from Evangeline truly is. While not your typical TikTok nubile by any standard, the promise of this work is unassumingly brilliant, a poetic statement, revealing storytelling cordially nuanced with xylophones, bright guitar chords, and draped by wet, wave-like rhythms.
Born to a creative California family, and having experienced the trappings and pitfalls of artistry under a former project, the warmth of Fuzzy feels like fresh-turned soil, a bed of ideas wanting for ripening. The EP was a happy accident of pandemic lulls, accidental structure, and an artistic pivot shedding one artistic skin for another, all of which bundles into an aesthetic or living grey area; life “distressed to the moment of softness.”
Composed initially with a DIY on the carpet mindset, being “lucky in an unlucky time” allowed Evangeline to collaborate intimately with Dillon Casey, who she credits for being both a great musician and interpreter, a co-architect of the songs that filtered “feelings that need rooms built around them.” The bulk of Fuzzy is sonic vignettes, small portraits captured in notes and melodies, a celebration of life’s awkward gifts whether they be a post-fight walk through the neighborhood with a lover, a pithy exchange with an online nuisance, or a delicious understanding finally understood.
The end of this beautiful EP is like letting go of a hand—once strange, now familiar through episodic adventures, stitched together by emotional overlap and fleshy diversions, the urge to just grip it again and dance together into the fuzzy backlit horizon. I’ll be doing just that, letting what's out of focus feel that much better when I know it's soft to the auditory touch.
Listen to Fuzzy below: