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| Artwork by Adam Burke. |
I admit I didn’t know much about World War I until recently. But with the recent centennial of the war, which began with the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, I’ve gained a new appreciation for this most grisly of wars, in which national identities were born as empires collapsed. Millions of average men died in squalid trenches as horrifying new technologies, including the use of poisonous gas, the widespread use of the machine gun and the armored tank were deployed. Not only did the earth became a putrid wasteland of unburied corpses but the war was directly responsible for spreading the virulent Spanish Flu, which killed millions around the world. World War I was so bad that it was called the War to End All Wars, because people thought that certainly no war could be worse. Instead, the political instability unleashed continues, like an unbroken thread of terror, in parts of Europe and the Middle East to this day.
It’s against this hellish backdrop that New Jersey’s long-running elegiac funeral doom quintet Evoken have set their latest album, Hypnagogia. On a battlefield during that horrible war, an anonymous soldier muses bitterly on his impending death. He records his thoughts in a journal, then strikes a deal with a malevolent spirit to leave part of his soul behind to attach itself to -- and drive to suicide -- whomever chances to read the journal. With each successive death the spirit becomes stronger and more deadly, weaving an unbroken tale of terror through the century.
Evoken has always been completely unafraid to push the boundaries of metal further than they can go, and then some. I had the distinct pleasure of seeing them perform an experimental set with Merzbow for the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh back in 2013. Brian Sanders, who contributed cello for their 2012 release, Atra Mors, returns on Hypnagogia, and at times plays a starring role. The album begins with an ominous string arrangement from Sanders, along with a distant chorale. The feeling is deep, dark and foreboding; lush and natural. A peal of squalling feedback introduces the crushing mechanical elements, bringing to mind primitive iron tanks rolling over and subjugating all that is natural about the land. Through eight songs, the band chugs through scathing doom with gnarled, blackened bits, serpentine riffage and eerie keyboard melodies, and pastoral, mournful passages with evocative vocals and stately string arrangements.
The album includes two short instrumentals -- aptly titled "Hypnagogia" and "Hypnopompic," that act as interludes in the action and represent the soldier's death and rebirth. The term “hypnagogia” refers to hallucinations a lot of us experience in the moments just before sleep when our bodies are paralyzed but our minds are still active. By contrast, “hypnopompic” is when we have paralyzed hallucinations upon waking up. If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night thinking there’s an intruder in your bedroom and unsuccessfully tried to scream, you’ve had a hypnopompic hallucination. Both songs have a hallucinogenic, disorienting quality and provide fitting bookends to the album's most adventurous song, "Ceremony of Bleeding, " which features a haunting, operatic choir ensemble in the middle. The album’s final song, “The Weald of Perished Men,” begins with ambient noise of crickets, wind and the sound of digging before easing into a clean, uplifting guitar melody that weaves its way through the entire song. A mournful cello and keyboard passage follows, with the soldier questioning what will become of him, then segues into crushing guitars and scathing vocals.
Fittingly released on Nov. 9, just before the centenary of war’s end on Nov. 11, 2018, Hypnagogia is an elegantly bleak, yet strangely warm and uplifting, ode to one lonely, anonymous man who found an ingenious way to live on, while repaying the world for the futility of his death.