thellama73
This is a tough one to rate. It is technically accomplished, competently performed, and well produced. From the crackling static that opens the album, to the atmospheric pianos and reverb drenched vocals, it certainly takes you to another place. However, I have reservations about rating it very highly because the music is so dark, so slow, and so heavy that for me it's practically unlistenable after the first couple of tracks, and this is coming from a guy who loves sludge/doom metal above almost any other metal genre.
Evoken truly takes wallowing in downtuned misery to new heights (or depths, I suppose I should say.) Almost all the songs are around ten minutes in length, and due to the extremely slow tempos they seem to drag on forever. There's no variety to speak of; the whole record is uniformly depressing.
Despite the album's many merits, in the end I had to go with a two star rating. You have to really, really like slower-than-molasses death metal in order to be able to enjoy this at all, so I would say it's for die hard genre fans only.