Evoken - Hypagogia

I had never heard of Evoken before seeing Profound Lore’s evident excitement with getting to releasing the New Jersey group’s sixth record here (as well as releasing their preceding fifth record, Atra Mors, back in 2012). Being that I was hardly into doom metal, if at all, in 2012, I’m not surprised this was the first I had heard of the apparently long-running cherry-breakers of the American death/doom scene, but Hypnagogia is definitely making me hit myself even more for not appreciating funeral doom until rather recently. The album is an expansive field of sorrow and desolation across its eight most-lengthy pieces, injecting not only a genuine sense of anguish into the genre, but making use of a variety of methods and musical elements to do so.

The band embark on an hour-long funeral march across a landscape of mourning and melancholy just as can be expected for a project falling under the death/doom umbrella, but Hypnagogia is fortunately just another trek across the valley of the shadow of death, indulgent in walls of sound and human pain with no real sense of tact or meaning. No, Evoken are keen to weave in a variety of influences to diversify their sonic portfolio and keep Hypnagogia both captivating and ambitious.

The glorious slow build of the intro track, “The Fear After”, leads from a hazy synth drone into a deadly, vast, and gothically looming expanse of distorted guitar walls, harmonic minor key piano and string backing, and soul-sucking death growls. Songs like the ten-minute “Too Feign Ebullience” (with a long slow drum beat-driven section that gives way to a truly saddening string outro) stay largely within the usual realms of funeral doom, but there are also bursts of more quick-paced drumming and rapid tremolo-picking, along with some winding solos like those on “Valorous Consternation” that keep the album from falling into a homogeneous rut. The song “Ceremony of Bleeding” continues to expand the album’s sonic palette in its latter moments by bringing in the lower register tones of the guitar and a fittingly ceremonious clean vocal section, all of which is worked nicely into the overbearing despondency of the funeral doom sound of the album, not distracting or gimmicky at any step of the way.

I also really like the dynamic the two shorter tracks bring to the flow of the album. The title track rides a spooky goth synth line that sounds somewhat choral and builds a short mist of distortion around it for a helpful instrumental break in the track list. The song “Hypnopompic” is just a short segue into the dragging closing track (whose drawn-out anticlimax is possibly the album’s only notable weak spot), but I love the combination of the sorrowful clean guitar line and the steady tom beat over the woodwinds and subtle distorted guitar; it’s a really beautiful and strangely hopeful moment on an album already full of dread and mourning.

Hypnagogia is definitely not the kind of death/doom album that’s reaching out to make itself accessible to those opposed to the genre, but it might contain just the right combination of symphoinic, gothic, and atmospheric ideas to sway plenty of the undecided demographic. I think I might have been more receptive to death/doom in my earlier years if I was exposed to something like this rather than the rough-around-the-edges sounds that Anathema and Katatonia both pioneered and subsequently abandoned (which I do have a greater appreciation for now). As for Evoken, this record has definitely got me interested in their back catalog, and I am definitely going to be enjoying this album’s interesting and comprehensive spin on the funeral doom style rather thoroughly.