Photo by Eva Tusquets
The most prominent and significant American death/funeral doom emissaries EVOKEN succeed their 2018 landmark Hypnagogia album with their stunning seventh full-length opus, Mendacium, set for release on October 17th on Profound Lore Records.
Mendacium is a work that will reveal itself as one of the darkest and most oppressive EVOKEN albums among their unparalleled repertoire. Where 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 Antithesis Of Light masterworks, all while still encapsulating the tectonic-shifting nature of their Caress Of The Void and Atra Mors releases and 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 enlisted the services of producer Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal who worked with EVOKEN on their Antithesis Of Light and Quietus albums respectively. The resulting Mendacium captures 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.
Thematically, Mendacium bestows an intriguing concept and story. It tells the tale of a fourteenth 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?
In advance of the release of Mendacium, today the band unveils the album’s first single, “Matins,” noting of the track, “‘Matins’ is a peek into a reality.
Stream EVOKEN’s “Matins” HERE.
Mendacium, which features cover art by Worthless, will be released on CD, LP and digital formats.
Find preorders at THIS LOCATION.
Mendacium Track Listing:
1. Matins
2. Lauds
3. Prime
4. Terce
5. Sext
6. None
7. Vesper
8. Compline
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful” – Seneca
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