The catacombs of funeral doom are laden with cobwebbed artifacts and the dust of decades of slow, hauntingly nightmarish music. Occasionally, there is a shifting casket lid, as one artist or another emerges from their slumber to unleash the bleak dreams of death upon the world. Some caskets remain forever closed, others lie in wait, the stench of their decay reaching a terminal point where the only relief from the suffering is to open the creaky hinges and exhale the most intense and deliberate of doom metal into the ether. That is to say, the best funeral doom bands take a long time to release new material. Which is understandable, as funeral doom, a merger of doom metal and death metal slowed to a tectonic pace over long songs, requires a lot of composition to get right. These aren’t ten minute jam sessions, rather epics of maudlin chaos, reigned in by the intention to invoke mesmerizing journeys of emotional and macabre depth.
In these hallowed and often forgotten crypts lies New Jersey’s Evoken, at this point legends of the genre, who over thirty years have unleashed six tomes of graven melodies and bleak missives. Their last full length effort was 2018’s Hypnagogia, which, along with 2012’s Atra Mors, I revisit at least once a year when I inevitably fall back into a funeral doom mood. Now, after seven years of slumber, Evoken return with another tome of mournful and frightening tracks with Mendacium, a concept album about a 14th century Benedictine monk plagued by illness and quarantined to his chambers where he must grapple with his obedience to God while suffering the pains of illness and isolation until an otherworldly entity creeps through the cracks of his room, or perhaps his psyche.
Gnarly, right? The concept calls to mind Dalton Trumbo‘s novel Johnny Got His Gun, where a soldier is left blind, deaf, and quadriplegic after a horrid wartime injury, having only his thoughts to comfort and torment him through the pain. Metallica famously wrote their classic “One” about this book. Evoken, however, sound nothing like Metallica‘s thrash classic, and instead fit in more with acts like Paradise Lost, disembowlment, and funeral doom pioneers Thergothon. Over their career, Evoken have warped their sound into grander compositions and aural textures than their funeral doom forebearers, increasingly favoring synthesized atmospherics and gothic passages (think Dead Can Dance over more punk- or electronic-influenced goth). Mendacium, however, is a return to form, in a sense, for Evoken, favoring more of death metal’s grit than their more melodic recent albums, even returning to producer Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal, who worked with the band on Quietus and Antithesis Of Light in the early 2000s.
Mendacium manifests as a culmination of Evoken‘s early sound and their more recent output, and it is satisfying as hell. “Matins” introduces us to the album, delivering a dirge of dissonant ambience, drums heavy with reverb, undead growls, and touches of piano that give way to cavernous death metal passages. “Lauds” almost feels like a traditional death-doom track for the first three minutes until a foray into ominous gothic chanting welcomes a more grim and slow pace as our protagonist meets his otherworldly companion in his dreams. These first two songs are nearly 20 minutes total, so, if you made it this far, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect for the rest of the album. Evoken‘s music plays out like an inverse Deafheaven. Rather than shimmering shoegaze we get mandolin and synth interludes; instead of blast beats giving way to punctuated, emotional highs, Evoken gives us dark ages sleep paralysis demons and terrifying lows with BPMs that hit at a sledgehammer’s pace. It is a beautiful juxtaposition, nonetheless, as long as you find beauty in madness and death.
I do love that shit, and it makes the stellar death metal outro of “Terce” all the better. Later, “None” stands out with a similar death-doom classicism, juxtaposing the slow burn of “Sext” before becoming as angelic as Evoken can get as the monk is faced with temptation. It is maybe the most triumphant sounding funeral doom song I have ever heard. “Vesper” plays like a dungeon synth/dark ambient track that extends to nearly four minutes, but in funeral doom terms, it feels like an interlude, giving us a graceful calm before the massive sounding finale of “Compline”, which shows Evoken in full mastery of their powers, weaving slow doom with crushing death metal that climaxes with one of the most haunting and brutal sounding moments I can remember ever hearing in my 27 years of being a metalhead.
Mendacium is a doomed feast for dying ears, alternating between scalding abrasiveness and eerie calms that pierce like a gust of November winds on your skin. Evoken are miles ahead of their funeral doom peers, sticking with an old school tone while dropping in the right amount of modern experimentations that reminds me of the smell of old books and the warm plastic and aluminum of a stereo receiver as you listen to a cassette a buddy told you to check out, but now you can look up the lyrics on your phone instead of squinting at the J-card. In a niche genre where experimentation grabs attention quicker than tradition, it is refreshing to hear a band harken back to the classics, but then again, Evoken have nothing but classics. Mendacium is another one in the making.
