Hooded Menace rises from the grave.
After four years of silence, Lasse Pyykkö (guitar/bass, Claws, Phlegeton, Vacant Coffin…), Pekka Koskelo (drums, Ruinebell, Vacant Coffin, ex-Phlegeton) and Harri Kuokkanen (vocals, Hail Conjurer, Hollow Woods, Ride for Revenge…) exhume Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration, their seventh album.
Antti Poutanen (Devenial Verdict, Spiteborn, ex-Church of the Dead) is also back on violin, as is John McNulty (Coltsblood, ex-Conan) on spoken word.
The keyboards of Twilight Passages, coupled with melodious guitar, immediately plunge us into a kind of melancholic trance that is broken by the rhythm of Pale Masquerade, a first track with harmonics that are almost too joyful, but which form a logical continuation of the introduction. The arrival of the macabre vocals reinforces the darkness of the sound, creating a contrast with the lighter touches and thus reinforcing the oppression of the heaviness while allowing the Heavy roots to color the leads, even causing accelerations before letting the sweetness live for a short moment on Portrait Without a Face. Saturation and aggression quickly reassert themselves, along with long, mournful screams that denote simple, catchy passages but blend perfectly with the more virulent moments, still inhabited by a few ritualistic tones before returning to slower tones. We feel almost cursed by the vocalist before the soothing final touch that rubs off on the first moments of Daughters of Lingering Pain, before being plunged back into the very essence of the haunting doom that the band sometimes approaches with a heady groove, but also with a contrasting approach between epic flights of fancy and passages led by leads filled with despair. It is the choirs that welcome us on Lugubrious Dance, the next track, but they fall silent to let the musicians develop a haunting rhythm halfway between their heavy Doom/Death and more lively roots, creating an ambivalent dynamic in which the voices reappear from time to time, then the rhythm softens as it joins Save a Prayer. The song borrowed to Duran Duran even has some very accessible passages where the harmonics seem ghostly and respond to Harri’s hoarse roars, which wander between the riffs until they become much more present, but it is with Into Haunted Oblivion that the band closes this new chapter. The verses are back in their rawest form, but once again it is with a rather bright guitar that the harmonics come to life, the ultimate witnesses to the permanent duality that the band cultivates until the last spark of existence, responding to the two guests whose interventions make the sound even more gloomy.
While the band remained fairly quiet, Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration confirms that Hooded Menace is still lurking among us. The sound is as macabre as can be, inviting us into its vault to savor its morbid, damp freshness, which we revel in.
85/100