Only a fool would ever call an album by New Jersey doom legends Evoken casual. Each of the band's five full-lengths-- including their first in five years, the enormous and exhausting Atra Mors-- trudges well beyond the hour mark, slowly pushing its respective way toward the limits of a compact disc or a two-LP set. But long albums alone don't make for notable ones; rather, Evoken pair that love of length with a near-militaristic obsession with volume, mass, and deliberate movement. Their records tend to supply a sense of seismic upheaval, whether through the rumble of a rhythm section that plods with the heaviest of them before springing into short, crushing bursts or the choking-world roar of frontman John Paradiso. If funeral doom is among the most oppressive forms of music, Evoken have undoubtedly become one of its most ambitious and aggressive practitioners by creating their own, all-involving worlds from the form's dimly lit sounds. Atra Mors, then, is a proud, punishing return.
Aside from the break in productivity that preceded it, the most noteworthy aspect of Atra Mors that separates it not only from the band's back catalog, but also from many of its sometimes more direct peers, is its motion and misdirection. More than ever, Evoken seem ready to put all the elements of their sound-- the textural thickness and the unmitigated forcefulness, the bludgeoning metal and the symphonic scope-- to work at once. During the opening title track, for instance, creeping expanses of doom lunge into quickened bits of razor-wire vitriol. Keyboards cut beneath and between it all, not only thickening the sound but stringing the pieces together. "The Unechoing Dread" lingers in a strangely liminal space, teetering between ghoulish washes and stentorian barrages, between blackened builds and drone deconstruction. Aside from two instrumental interludes, no track on Atra Mors is easily classified, as the band creates a cycling continuum of the ideas it's long championed rather than separate sprawls of them.
Combined with Atra Mors' run time, that quality renders the album as an in-or-out event, a vacuum that tends to seal its listener off from surroundings; in short, it's loud, twisted, and daunting enough to necessitate complete attention. As if by way of acknowledgement, "An Extrinsic Divide"-- a song about being trapped in halls of futility, where "hope is only a mockery of its own illusion"-- bends time both forward and backward. After fading from a four-on-the-floor stomp and before heaving toward a Meshuggah-mechanical passage, Paradiso and guitarist Chris Molinari push and pull the riff, stretching it like wire across the beat. It's disorienting and thrilling, the sort of out-of-body experience that bands create when they suspend the listener in a world of their own curation. It's not unlike the effect of the Grateful Dead or even drone music, where subtle changes within a much bigger system provide thrills beyond the surface.
That said, Atra Mors isn't an easy or amicable listen. In the time since 2007's A Caress of the Void, acts within several spheres of extreme metal have added more accessible flourishes, whether that's the gray and sometimes kaleidoscopic layers within the folds of recent blackness or the strings finally cutting through the weight of Sunn O))). Pieces of Atra Mors are indeed beautiful, like the sweeping strings and broadly brushed acoustic guitar of interlude "Requies Aeterna" or the relative calm that begins and occasionally bisects the destructive "Descent Into Chaotic Dream". For some listeners, that track and several brief impasses during a few others might even suggest the steely-eyed post-rock start of Slint. But those are details within a marathon of unrepentant, unrelenting torment, an obstacle course that rewards endurance with one of the most malevolent, majestic hours of music since Evoken eked out their last one. After all, though closer "Into Aphotic Devastation" begins with a triumphant guitar riff and hints at some sort of cleansing coda, Evoken soon toughen up. Layers of noise and echoes of Paradiso's menace wrap beneath unsteady builds toward a series of full-volume blasts. Surprisingly, Evoken spend the last few minutes relaxing the meter and the volume, a synthesizer's distant, pretty peal slowly merging with the collapsing roar. The torment goes on forever, the quintet seems to imply, even when they step away for a while.
