Evocation - Tales from the Tomb
March 24 2008 at 06:41:51 AM
Though Evocation attained cult status early on within Death Metal’s underground trade-circuit, the band dissolved before ever being signed to a label, leaving behind only two demo tapes later re-released through Andy Harris’s Breath of Night records in 2004. Solidity and anticipation - caught between the rough pummeling of Stockholm and the mournful tendencies of Gothenburg - helped garner their following and now, regrouping with the old lineup nearly intact (and not a better year for it), Evocation re-enters clean, uncoiled for their long-planned debut.
And it’s a fine debut, consistent anyway, although just as often clouded by a nostalgia that never quite bears out in the end. The passage of years is unavoidably present in the crafting of more pop-sensible hooks and choruses (“Blessed Upon The Altar,” “Feed The Fire,” “From Menace to Mayhem”) even as the group covers, re-records tracks and, as they surely would have done if signed way back when, turn to artist Dan Seagrave, whose paintings will make suckers of us all yet.
The band emerges not as an artifact thawed and unchanged, but well prepared to enter today’s scene with an album almost wholly derived from the works of At The Gates, Dismember and Entombed circa 1995. Disregard any review that mentions the genre’s “roots.” Your opinion of Slaughter of The Soul is the measure of your receptiveness and being so, some may well be unwilling to part with their first recordings for the moment.
[Todd DePalma]
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