Warthur Standing athwart the thin borderline between death-doom metal and funeral doom, what Evoken offer up on Embrace the Emptiness combines the glacial pace and sombre tone of funeral doom combined with the gutteral malevolence of death-doom. The sophistication offered by Dario Derna's keyboard work and Charles Lamb's maudlin cello sits next to and adds texture to the slow, bloody dissection Nick Orlando engages in with his guitar solos. The pace is a bit more varied than some funeral doom releases, which will help those less familiar with the genre get into it, but it's never too fast for long - like a momentary twitch of life in a dying body.

Warthur Evoken's Antithesis of Light combines slow riffs, glacial song structures, and demonic growls in a fairly standard funeral doom metal formula. Those who are especially fond of this genre and simply want more of the same will probably enjoy themselves, but for my part I found that the album lacks personality compared to slightly more flavourful offerings in the field - there's no sprinkling of elements of other genres to spice things up like you find in Esoteric's material, for instance. On the other hand, if you haven't sampled any pure funeral doom before it might be a good introduction to the subgenre.

Wilytank Evoken are another essential funeral doom metal band that I needed to review, but damn! I've listened to their second and third albums before my big FDM epiphany with Funeral's 'Tristesse'. I thought the first, 'Quietus', was quite fine and that the other, 'Anithesis of Light', was pretty phenomenal. After my FDM epiphany, I've given Evoken's debut, 'Embrace the Emptiness' a listen and ended up being immensely impressed.

First, there's an intro track that portrays what can be found on the rest of the album: light sounding guitar played with the regular funeral doom followed by a section of quiet, dark ambient on the second half of the intro. I'm feeling two vibes here. It sounds mournful like most traditional funeral doom, but it also sounds deep and void-like like Esoteric take on the genre. I think Evoken found the sweet spot between the two and made something great out of it.

Then, "Tragedy Eternal" kicks in. To go through all The drumming gets quite quick with the kick drums being given a good exercise, but this isn't entirely uncommon in the funeral doom genre. There are still those slow moments of plodding funeral doom.

Lead guitars exist and do break into solos at least once per song. Production wise, the guitars sound the rawest of all the instruments, but it's barely noticeable when layered with the keyboards and drums which are well produced. The clean sounding soft guitar is one of the key players here and fits in well at any part of the album, be it melancholic pieces like "Tragedy Eternal" or more menacing ones like "Chime the Centuries End", though there is much more of the latter than the former (which I consider a good thing). The keyboards also do their part to augment the atmosphere with the presentation on "Chime the Centuries End" making me feel like I'm staring downward into an abyss. It all feels so dark and empty, hence 'Embrace the Emptiness'.

I feel like Evoken issued forth the modern wave of funeral doom with the cleaner sound. Though they were a little late bringing out their debut full-length in 1998 when Skepticism and Esoteric already belted out two albums each, Evoken's 'Embrace the Emptiness' is still very inspirational. I can see a lot of their style in acts like Ataraxie, Ahab, and others.

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.