Style: occult / medieval black metal
Band info:
Giordano Bruno (Prince of Agony) - vocals, keyboards
Suspiria (The Princess of Disease) - female vocals
Samael von Martin (Lord of Sorrow) - electric & acoustic guitars, flute
Evol comes from Italia. It's a 3 piece band that was created in 1993 : 2 men & one woman. The band evolves in the black metal sceene & describes itself as a pure atomospheric black metal act. One thing is sure with Evol it's that they compose in a very original way. Originality in the composition & in the tone that tend to medieval style ("the eve", i.e. ). For instance, Evol has released 2 demos " The Tale of the horned king" & " the dark dreamquest part 1" albums. This last one was released by maggot productions & is still available through Adipocere records. More over, Adipocere recordssigned the band & released 2 albums yet : The first one is called "Saga of the horned King" & the 2d one "Dreamquest". A new mCd & Cd is now scheduled, still with Adipocere records.
Saga of the horned King : Keyboards are an omnipresent instrument in Evol's music. & it's ot only an use for surroundings. Keyboards bring a large part of the melodies & are sometimes the basis of some songs. ("Through foggy pains..." or " the present age" ). There's also 2 singer in the band : the first one in a black metal style, the second one is a female singer ( so, female voice is not only an added voice, put there only for surroundings). These 2 voices are largerly used. When guitars & drums appear, it's often to emphasize & strenghthen melodies. Musically speaking, tempos are rather slow. Surroundings are dark & very sad & based on the repetition. Evol is like a black metal version of old Paradise Lost ( "Sorrow the witch") . For a first album, sound is quite good & arrangements are audacious ( "the return of the horned king"). It's a real anguish album with a rich music based on subtle arrangements.
Dreamquest : With this 2d album, Evol goes in the same way than the first one. But the band has made alot of progress, in thier technical level, in their ability of composition, in their sound, ...Evol is now a mature band & they become fearsome & handsome. It's still a blend of heavy songs with mediaval tone, but this time, tempos are rather rapid & sometimes speed ("flying with the night-gaunts" or "the black crystal of Astar". The whole album seems less dark. Structures of the songs are more complex & the band uses more original instruments & sound, even if keyboards are still omnipresent. Musically speaking, rythmics are more & more heavier & sometimes it can remain Metallica ( "dark stairs of R'lyeh"). Evol succeeds in enriching again its music with a great vocals work : use of various tone, gothic, death, opera, black, female, there's also a pure black metal voice singing!!...Evol still knows how to frighthened audience. Their universe is still fearsome. Evol takes again the basis of its music & continue to innovate & enrich them, to offer a new album that surpass the first one. It's sure that Evol is perhaps too much complex if you want to discover lack metal, but the band, created by skilled musicians is one of the best one & one the most original in that style. Note that there's also an hidden track on Dreamquest...
Evol is back with a mini CD, before a 3d CD (Portraits) that will soon be available. Created in 1993, Evol still pursues its way developped on 'the saga of the horned king' & their last & excellent album 'Dreamquest'. If at their beginning, Evol created keyboards songs among 'classical' ones,, they did differently for their second album which was blending more keyboards within songs. More, some of them were built on keyboards parts instead of doing like several bands( that adds keys parts after creating songs). For this mini CD, Evol makes us wait with 5 tracks. The first one is 11 minutes long & based upon several movements like on classical music. There's 3 chapter. It's a classical made songs for Evol. But the most interesting one is surely the instrumental 'Phenomena' which is very attractive . The tittle track of this album is one of the most brutal song they composed . It starts very rapidly& then it takes a more reasonnable tempos. Still blending a black metal voice with a female spoken voice, Evol masters it more & more through the years. Now, the 3d album must establish them definitly!
2) Evol is an experimental spanish group from Barcelona. This is the group listen on the player. Evol is a computer music cell started in 1996. At the core of the project is Roc Jiménez de Cisneros. Occasional EVOL members and/or collaborators include Danish composer and multi-instrumentist Jakob Draminsky Højmark, English sound artist Joe Gilmore, Spanish writer and sound artist Anna María Ramos, British video artist Andy Davies, Berlin-based sound artist Rubén Patiño and Scottish sound artist Joel Ongthorne.
Evol's work has been released on internationally acclaimed record labels such as Mego, Lucky Kitchen, Diskono, Scarcelight, Antifrost or fals.ch.
2003 saw the birth of a series of electroacoustic pieces entitled Punani, which addresses some of the main aspects of Evol's work, namely: algorithmic composition, noise, psychedelia, diverse synthesis techniques, spectro-morphology and the musical application of fractal geometry and other mathematical phenomena. The series has five parts so far.
3) Evol also used to be a Californian speed/thrash metal band. They released a demo in 1989 and an album called Experiment in Fear in 1992. After there release they played a couple shows and had a live version of "Cyco-Self" on the metal compilation Mosh on Fire: Banned in LA. Then the following year they broke up.
4) Evol is a Japanese death-grind band. Their releases include, among other things, a split with Mortalized.