Review by Rexorcist for Evoken - Antithesis of Light (2005)

What with doom metal being my new primary focus, I'm becoming more determined than ever to perfect a proper chart of it all because my overall knowledge and experience of its various subgenres is actually minimal.  I've only heard 17 death doom albums and 11 funeral doom, including only three Evoken albums.  Thankfully, Evoken can add to both to help, so I have a foundation for either genre.  I already reviewed two other Evoken albums over the past couple of days, and I was more impressed with the atmospheric focus of their second in comparison to their good but generic debut.  I had no idea of knowing what was going to happen.

After our creepy intro of noise and wails, In Solitary Ruin covers a freakishly heavy blackened death background molding with structural and atmospheric aspects of the previous album, Quietus.  The band wasn't afraid to teeter-totter between slow, middle and fast paces in order to keep the song's specific mood original and to keep the layout challenging.  This one song is an incredible combination of doom, death, post and even black, aurally turning hell itself into a cold and desolate winter world with a few instances of hypnotic gothic guitars.

Now that I've written a good paragraph about the 10-minute intro and the first epic, let's head to the next song: Accursed Premonition, which sets up a slightly more classical vibe with hypnotic, aquatic dripping of noise and some choral vocals.  It starts out much clearer than In Solitary Ruin, and the atmosphere is more gothic and funeral, and slightly less death to make room for a little more black.  This song doesn't take a lot of time to speed up, either, even going into some much lighter moments and switching to heavily blackened ones without ever losing its hypnotic presence.

The Mournful Refusal is deathlier in its backgrounds, but includes clearer and higher-pitched guitars digging into some more melodic territory, bringing back the hypnotic gothic picking as well, and including the speedy and tamed drumming of In Solitary Ruin.  Every bit of slower or faster pacing is used sparingly, and normally only by one instrument at a time to help the middle-pacing of the song's primary focus.  Even for the longest song on the track, the atmospheres are always shifting in consistent ways, relying on the occassional metal solo, molding perfectly with the vibe and giving us another unique track to the album.

Pavor Nocturnus throws us right into the middle of neoclassical darkwave paired with loud guitars, increasing the melody factor.  The synths give us a strangely heavenly approach, like the lamentation of seeing a spirit of a beloved one rise to the sun shining beyond silver clouds and entering Heaven.  Pavor Nocturnus shows a perfect layout where each and every shift is carefully built up to and flows with incredible consistency.  Eventually it evolves into a storm of black riffage with flawless atmospheric riffage, but even that devolves into another doomy outro.

And now we enter the title track.  We have quiet synths leading us into the gloom of gothic doom metal, slightly romantic but just as scary as before.  But this song also gradually gets more extreme and less gothic overtime until it returns to the gothic behavior during the outro.  What we have here is a patient and sometimes progressive outlook on many of the elements that made previous songs so special, using length in unpredictable manners.

The final track is The last of Vitality, and it doesn't hesitate to start us off with a snailish stoner riff bereft of any of the black and death influences the album boasted about for so long.  And we get our most haunting dungeon synth backdrops to go with it, acting much more upfront.  But we soon get into a ferocious blast of bestial black speed and fury, almost creating a feeling of riding a motorcycle through a massive graveyard.  But we return to the gothic synths and our singer's growls turn into whispers.  This song is taking us all the way across the world of death: above the graveyard, six feet under all the bloodied dirt, and straight into heaven with no regard for sanity.  Our most haunting synths and backing vocals are featured here, creating what I believe is a perfect ending.

It is so true that these songs are very long, but for once in my life I came across a doom album that managed to keep these lengths generally inventive and creative.  A large part of it was the fact that this is one of the most deathly and metallic atmospheres I have ever heard, relying on a number of metallic elements like black and goth as well as non-metallic elements like dungeon synth and darkwave to get a very strong hypnotic vibe.  This is the kind of album where many of the songs will switch out the same elements every so often, justifying such a move by applying different levels of focus to both different moods and different genres, so it's an incredible challenge to predict what's going to happen.

I have never heard a doom metal album like this.  Antithesis of Light gave me more than what I ask for from a good album.  This is the first funeral doom album that passed the fifty minute mark and didn't feel too long, because its atmosphere, emotional core and presentation are all superbly well thought out.  Each brand of hypnosis is similar yet shifting.  Very diverse and intense, depending on my future moods this could very well be the best doom metal album I've ever heard.