A classic of earth-shaking ultradoom, one of the slowest and most depressing funereal deathdoom albums ever. Evoken's mighty Embrace The Emmtiness was the band's first album and combined impossibly slow and grinding riffs with a suffocating atmosphere of sadness that coalesced from great sheets of dismal ambience and funereal pipe-organ like synthesizers, a kind of glacial ambient death metal. We're talking about total Thergothon worship here, and Evoken even took their name from Thergothon's Fhtagn Nagh Yog-Sothoth demo. Embrace... was first released on Elegy Records in 1998 and went out of print not much later, and the album has become almost mythic in death/doom circles. No wonder - the gutteral growling vocals wet with cavernous reverb, frozen cemetary atmosphere, churning, impossibly detuned slow motion riffs and haunting minor key arias, layers of cathedral keys and droning chorales, strains of mournful cello, desolate arpeggios played on lone guitars drifting in a grey mist, vocals that go from monstrous grunting to hushed whispers, deep baritone singing and wicked blackened screams, gentle piano melodies and soaring solemn guitar lines all merge together perfectly into the most sorrowful, miserable metal imaginable.

Unavailable for years, Embrace was reissued in 2006 on the Russian label Solitude Production. Essential for anyone into Skepticism. Esoteric, Disembowelment, Thergothon, Finnish doom, My Dying Bride, Shape Of Despair, deathdoom, and dismal ethereal heaviness.