EVOKEN / BENEATH THE FROZEN SOIL

Light those candles and get high…on, uh, life of course. Or in this case funeral doom. Making it through the dense layers of ice, snow, and morbidity on this split between New Jersey's EVOKEN and Sweden's BENEATH THE FROZEN SOIL with a heartbeat will be your greatest challenge. But if you're a fan of crawling dread, then you already know it's worth the risk.

Long-running U.S. funeral doomsters EVOKEN get the edge here. The band's epic-length excursions into the grave envelop the listener without causing streaming tears of boredom in the process. Funeral doom for sure, yet the atmosphere of dark majesty and a keen sense of composition set them apart from many of their peers. In some sense similar to the moods created by MOURNING BELOVETH, tracks like 13-minute "The Pleistocene Epoch" strides like a behemoth along the muddy bottom, occasionally moving to higher ground that offers not reprieve, only new levels of shivering fright. Transitions through creepy spoken word segments and lightly picked eeriness are matched with gigantic riff crashes and the earth moving, deep growls of guitarist John Paradiso. Even a brief solo wrenched from the strings of a guitar at the 9:30 mark of the track commands attention. It is the act's knack for creating those kinds of impacting moments that gives depth to the doom. And that includes some well written melodic parts and faint shimmers of light, exemplified by the keyboard lines in "Omniscient" and "Vestigial Fears". EVOKEN's half closes with an instrumental called "Into the Primal Shrine", which is at once spooky and gruesome. Without a doubt, the Jersey guys offer a dynamic brand of funeral doom.

BENEATH THE FROZEN SOIL follows with a style that isn't as engrossing as the material from their U.S. counterparts, but does offer some similarities in the way of intelligent composition and general style, all in comparatively shorter timeframes. Nuance and accent abound, as the group weaves into its fabric whispers, witchy vocals, traditional growls, some decent cadence shifts, and even a little riff angularity (one of several effective twists on "Monotone Black I") to get the point across in the most morose of ways. Based on these three cuts alone it would appear that BENEATH THE FROZEN SOIL is a funeral doom unit with a bright (?) future.

The nutshell version of the review goes something like this. If you are looking for an introduction to the bleak world of funeral doom without having to swallow whole the work of acts more linear in approach, you'd do well to grab a copy of this one.