Evoken – Mendacium 2LP

The most prominent and significant American death/funeral doom emissaries EVOKEN succeed their 2018 landmark Hypnagogia with their seventh full-length opus Mendacium—a work that will reveal itself as one of the darkest and most oppressive EVOKEN albums among their unparalleled repertoire.

Where 2018s Hypnagogia would see the band capture and focus on a more melancholic, tangible, and even more of an accessible sonic design, Mendacium takes that acute shift back to the monumental dirge-like dread and woeful catacombic and disharmonious heaviness reminiscent of the band’s Quietus and Antitheses of Light masterworks. All while still encapsulating the tectonic-shifting nature of their Caress of the Void and Atra Mors releases while venturing more through classic gothic audial textures and even treading a little down experimental mire as well, reminiscing an aura seeping from such luminary artists as Dead Can Dance, Monumentum, and Disembowelment.

To signal this shift in sound harking back to this previous era, the band would recall the services of producer Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal who worked with EVOKEN on their Antithesis of Light and Quietus albums respectively. The result being Mendacium capturing a sepulchral heaviness saturated in ambience with even more of an emphasis on deathlike dread and anguish; an ambience reflecting the depths and catacombs of an ancient cathedral or monastery, ultimately defining Mendacium as EVOKEN’s most powerful sounding album to date.

Mendacium tells the tale of a 14th century elder Benedictine monk with malady from illness preventing him from leaving his room within the monastery he dwells within. His faith and service to God can never be satiated. Slowly declining in health and sleepless from continuous pain, the monk encounters a hideous entity emerging through a tear in reality. The story questions, is the torment of this monk by each passing hour being inflicted by this entity or is it all within his own mind?