Best of 2007 - #19

19. evoken - 'a caress of the void'
As the more extreme forms of doom, and funeral doom in particular, become a more broadly accepted proposition, more and more bands of the sort begin to show up, either newly formed, or being picked up more easily by record labels. It's also a time, however, to remember the ones who have been here before, and who still are the natural leaders of the genre. Direct spiritual descendents of the two entities that basically formed the entire blueprint for the genre, Disembowelment and Thergothon, they have been spreading their miserable, crawl-paced terror since the frightening 1996 EP 'Shades Of Night Descending'. Always at the forefront with such monuments of heavy slow doom such as 1998's 'Embrace The Emptiness' or the recent 2005's 'Antithesis Of Light', Evoken have now delivered an album of a magnitude that can rival with anything they've done before. 'A Caress Of The Void' is a bottomless pit of despair, and a much more dangerous one than before. This time, there's camouflaged quicksand covering the pit, so you'll think you'll be okay at first and then you'll start to sink in, slowly, until you realize the creeping horror that's still down there. There is a newfound sense of melody (within this context, let's not get carried away with the word 'melody' here) in Evoken's music, with a song like 'Mare Erythraeum', for example, providing an almost singable line, or at least hummable. These bits, and the slightly more digestible song sizes, that now hover around the eight minute mark, make 'A Caress Of The Void' an album that's strangely easier to get into, but that on the other hand proves impossible to get out of. The small specks of light make the darkness all the more impenetrable, a feeling that's very helped both by the band's amazing performance and by the perfect production - the sound can get literally suffocating in behemoths like 'Astray In Eternal Night'. At one point, you'll need to come out for air, but you'll just want to hold your breath and go back in again.

Evoken - 'Astray In Eternal Night'