Founded in 1994, Evoken is one of the oldest still going extreme doom metal bands. A headlining gig for a band like this is quite a rarity. So reason enough to go to the Baroeg on this Friday afternoon. The German band Ophis was supposed to play the support slot, but they canceled shortly before the gig.

The replacement was a Dutch cult act named Phlebotomized. Their debut album Immense Intense Suspense from 1994 is a highly original death metal album with some doom and oddities thrown into the mix; not in the least a violin and a keyboard. They reformed in 2013 with partly the original line-up and I was lucky enough to see them twice then. Lots of line-up changes later, they released a new album a few years ago. Which impressed me a lot less. This gig started off with a few new songs. These sound mostly like melo-death, and even though well-written lack the peculiar songwriting of their early material. The songs they played from then: Barricade, Mustardgas and Devoted To God just sound quite different from the newer material. Decent gig.

The US doom band Evoken is a whole different beast. It isn’t exactly a secret that they are heavily influenced by the mighty diSEMBOWELMENT. They tend to stay in the slower parts most of the time though. They managed to squeeze no less than eight of their quite long songs in the 75 minutes they got. And throughout their career they have been quite consistent as we got a song or more from almost all their albums. Antithesis of Light is still one of their best songs. Excellent gig.