Evoken Reissue Embrace the Emptiness 2LP on Season of Mist. So there had to be some measure of self-awareness at work back in 1998 when New Jersey death-doomers Evoken titled their hour-long debut album Embrace the Emptiness, right? I’m not sure even the band could’ve known just quite how much that would become the ethic by which just about everything they did following would abide. I was fortunate enough in my time to play a couple shows alongside Evoken, and whatever room they were in, they never failed to cast a dark, ultra-bleak pall over the place. Just astoundingly heavy and astoundingly miserable in a way that sometimes gets lost in bands of their ilk in favor of theatrical melodrama. No way. Evoken were always onto a rawer vision of the form.
