Officium Triste reopens.
In 2024, Pim Blankenstein (vocals, Extreme Cold Winter), Gerard de Jong (guitar), Martin Kwakernaak (keyboards), Niels Jordaan (drums), William van Dijk (guitar) and Theo Plaisier (bass) celebrate the band’s 30th anniversary with Hortus Venenum, their seventh album, released by Transcending Obscurity.
Behind Closed Doors opens the album with heady tones, joined by Pim‘s roars and massive rhythm, but also by the guitar’s soothing melodies. The haunting waves are easily followed by My Poison Garden, the album’s shortest composition, which seems rawer and darker despite the airy leads and relatively jerky rhythm. The break gives the track a second wind, offering livelier melodies before reaching Anna’s Woe and its hypnotic gentleness, which is charged with melancholy when the vocal parts appear, carried by soothing keyboards. The sound darkens again towards the end before fading out, and then Walk In Shadows begins slowly, allowing the instruments to settle calmly to develop intense passages, but also curtains of quietude where only a few words and a few notes get tangled up. Forcefield follows with a more oppressive sound, led by more energetic drums that initiate a few accelerations to lead us into Angels With Broken Wings, which initially progresses thanks to the violin and piano’s lullaby, but then becomes adorned with an epic veil thanks to the guitars that become dissonant on the final, closing the straitjacket of sorrow.
Even after thirty years, Officium Triste retains its hypnotic melancholy and delivers it in waves of pure sadness. Hortus Venenum‘s songs are already haunting fans’ minds, and will soon be spreading to the scene’s four corners.
90/100