First time in stock: the 2011 re-issue of Elegy's U.S. edition of Evoken's second album with new artwork and package design, first released in 1998, a classic slab of molten, soul-crushing death-doom/funereal doom.

Here's my old write-up of Embrace The Emptiness when I first listed the Cd version on Solitude Productions:

A classic of earth-shaking ultradoom, one of the slowest and most depressing funereal deathdoom albums ever. Evoken's mighty Embrace The Emptiness was the band's first album and combined impossibly slow and grinding riffs with a suffocating atmosphere of sadness and hopeless heartache that coalesced from great sheets of dismal ambience and funereal pipe organ-like synthesizers into a kind of glacial ambient death metal. We're talking about total Thergothon worship here, down to the fact that Evoken even took their name from Thergothon's Fhtagn Nagh Yog-Sothoth demo, if certain sources are to be believed. Embrace... was first released on Elegy Records back in 1998 and went out of print not much later, later re-issued on Cd on Solitude, and throughout this time the album has become almost mythic in death/doom circles. No wonder - the guttural growling vocals wet with cavernous reverb, frozen cemetery atmosphere, the churning, impossibly detuned slow motion riffs and haunting minor key arias all helped define the 'funeral doom' sound. 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.

There's not a whole more I can add; this record is still a benchmark in the funeral doom realm, essential listening for anyone into the likes of Skepticism. Esoteric, Disembowelment, Thergothon, My Dying Bride, and Shape Of Despair.