Evoken
Embrace The Emptiness

Imagine being in a remote and deserted village, with only the full moon lighting your way. You're wandering through its narrow streets, and at some point, you hear the tolls of a bell, glimpsing a church in the background. Next to this structure, dilapidated and full of cracks due to the passage of time, you spot an abandoned cemetery. You're inexplicably drawn to this cemetery, so you head towards it. In the center of the graveyard, among bent tombstones reduced to rubble, you notice a well. Attracted by a strange force, you throw yourself into the well and begin to swim in its cold waters. The sounds become increasingly muffled; once again, you hear the bells ringing, but they are distant chimes now. While swimming, you glimpse a light, resurface, and find yourself magically inside a stunning Gothic cathedral built within a cave. And it's from here, carried by the magnificent "Intro", that our journey with the music of the Americans Evoken, a doom band that released this album (their debut) in 1998, begins. A journey that will lead us to embrace the void and the darkness ("Embrace The Emptiness").

The quality of the music produced by the group is, unequivocally, exceptional. It's an even heavier and slower doom, imbued from the first to the last note with a desolate sadness and alienation. "Tragedy Eternal" is a perfect example of this. The stunning keyboard work, which gives the song misty and archaic contours, is complemented by the sublime guitar work, which like real boulders, manages to provide notable melodic bursts, delighting us with solos on the brink of agony. The drums, for their part, keep time in a way that seems never-ending, yielding, following the guitars, to magnificent death openings. Then everything seems to brighten up again thanks to the keyboards, which lighten the gloominess of the song with orchestral inserts of spiritual and ethereal hues. Last but not least, the vocals, a deep baritone growl, a rasp that occasionally emerges to remind us of the place we're visiting (the empty deserted cathedral), bringing with it hordes of spirits that float above us.

The first true masterpiece, however, is the third "Chime The Centuries End". Marked by a very slow bell sound that echoes between verses, supported by the elephantine drumming and the metallic and rocky guitar strokes (which occasionally sketch melodic arabesques with an almost oriental flavor), the song is a sweet torment that seems to be endless. Even a great fan of doom metal like myself finds it challenging to listen to this song, given its incredible slowness and gloominess, reaching truly inhuman levels. This is very strong stuff, definitely not suitable for everyone, and certainly requires many listens. At the onset of the acoustic and melodic break, one can almost catch a breath of relief: it's as if all that gloom had wrapped around our neck until that moment, riff after riff, preventing us from breathing and giving us a sense of eternal claustrophobia. Yet just as we think the grip has loosened, the same guitars and keyboards we believed had saved us turn into our executioners, and again we plunge into the infernal maelstrom of this song.

And it is the sumptuous "Ascend Into The Maelstrom" that confirms this idea of descending into a gray pitch sea made of tears, pain, and tormented passions. Here the voice is whispered and woeful, almost intoning an elegy for its own end, which indeed arrives with the resurgence of the deep growl. The descent begins, spiral after spiral, verse after verse, with genuine lacerations made by the successive death attacks, wounding and tormenting our soul more than the body. The next two tracks are nothing but the continuation of our venture into the void, a long journey almost comparable to an eternal sleep ("To Sleep Eternally") that will ultimately lead us to renounce and curse even our only source of salvation, the sun ("Curse The Sunrise").

The heaviness I felt listening to this work is exceptional; only a few groups have been able to evoke images of absolute denial of light in my mind like this album, which I undoubtedly consider a phenomenal work of a certain type of doom, the most funereal and devastating one.

Not for everyone, only for those few who can endure such intense and dark emotions. But for those few, it is absolutely recommended.