As a teenager, my musical education came primarily from living at a used CD store. You know how most used stores these days have a nice “new arrivals” stack, where all of the recently received contraband is placed before it’s eventually alphabetized? This shop hadn’t yet come up with such a system, instead stacking its used discs on the floor under the racks, and I monopolized the small crawlspace for hours every week to call dibs on the good shit.

I was eventually offered a job at this store because the manager said I wouldn’t need to be trained, and I continued to call shotgun on quality loot—Blue Note remasters, hard-to-find GBV bootlegs, a Pet Sounds box set that had the sellers’ warrant for arrest tucked into the liners. The place was my OiNK before OiNK. But when I got older, I realized something—no matter how many CDs pass through a used store, legitimately or otherwise, some bands’ albums practically never get sold.

Exhibit A: The Geraldine Fibbers.

I didn’t learn about them until well after their demise—it wasn’t until the years-ago re-recording of Red-Headed Stranger that I even knew who Carla Bozulich was, and I waited even longer after that to actually listen to a Fibbers record. On the one hand, I’m disappointed that I didn’t fall in love with the band when I was younger; would’ve been a perfect transition after my REM-obsessive pre-teen years to scream the lyrics to “Dragon Lady” at my bedroom wall, then repost them on my old Geocities site (blogs before blogs!). Plus, they might’ve cut Hole off at the pass. On the other hand, lead singer Bozulich’s transition from punk-with-a-drip-o-country to ephemeral, floaty, arty compositions is probably easier to bear in hindsight—I have no trouble putting 1997’s Butch and 2006 solo record Evangelista side-by-side, even if they’re so freaking different.

In a way, her latest record, now under the Evangelista moniker, kinda does that. The ‘06 album sounded like she wanted to free herself of songcraft, instead choosing to build mood by wailing over the white noise and tape manipulations concocted by members of bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion, and that’s all well and good. But I personally prefer Bozulich as a songwriter, as a drawn-out rock maestro, and Hello, Voyager reclaims her urgency, repurposing her new band/collective to rock out—in atypical fashion, anyway. The dark, death march of “Smooth Jazz” is punctuated by buzz-saw grunts of bass, shrieking carnival-esque lead guitar parts and occasional howls. That song’s immediately followed by Carla sharply turning gears and becoming a jazz crooner, her voice piping up on “Lucky Lucky Luck” over a soft, repetitive bassline as she announces, “When I was a baby, I was sweet as can be / I had a good heart, but I had to kill it.” The story kinda goes downhill from there.

The return to songwriting form is incredible throughout, though a few tracks on the record are all about the ambiance—some meandering and dark, others melodic and bursting with strings. The ultimate culmination of both of her extremes is the final, 12-minute title track, a song that sees Bozulich losing her poetic shit in grand, Patti Smith-like fashion. Drums bang around however they see fit, guitars occasionally blast a brief refrain, and organs begin to swell as Bozulich builds up the courage to beg for her identity: “Tell the truth and be free / This is my hit-and-run / This is my porn collection / This is me feeling superior to you / This is me selling me out when you needed me most / This is my huge, diseased, throbbing, PRICK / This is my homosexual inclinations / This is me loving someone I’m not supposed to love.” And then she pauses, audibly panting over the ruckus. “This is me.”