vote
8.0
- Band:
Hooded Menace - Duration: 00:46:53
- Available from: 03/10/2025
- Label:
-
Season of Mist
Streaming not yet available
Hooded Menace have never loved short paths: each of their disc seems to want to dig over time, not only for the duration of the songs, but for the way they build atmospheres and suggestions. “Lachrymose monuments of obscuration” is part of this trajectory with a safe step, but with the awareness of a band that, at this point of his career, can no longer afford to repeat himself. The darkness remains the main frame, but inside you move with greater freedom, between echoes doom, strong classic metal influences and a writing that tries to be enveloping more than simply overwhelming.
The natural confrontation is with “The Tritonus Bell”, a work that already let the desire to engage in the Doom fabric a traditionalist Heavy component, with riffs and harmonizations that looked without too many reverence fears at King Diamond, Mercyful Fate and at the most theatrical octentian school. With “Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration”, that direction is taken up and finished: where the previous disc showed some a little abrupt transitions, here each section seems more cohesive, every more measured evolution. Hooded Menace give themselves space and time, avoiding to saturate the tracks and building a narrative flow that moves with solemnity and internal logic.
The heart of the disc is obviously in the Riff of Lasse Pyykkö, once again the absolute director of writing. The guitarist focuses in these songs a considerable number of solutions without ever losing the wire, alternating slow and macabre progressions with harmonized impinics that seem to get out of a classic metal manual. The overall rendering is that of a sound that perhaps no longer has the creeping gloom of the first albums, but which remains imbued with a funeral and traits Gothic. The references to the old cathedral and certain paradise lost always remain inevitable: as in various works of both bands, melancholy marries an epic taste, where doom bords coexist with an idea of heaviness that does not give up the melodic clarity.
A song like “Portrait Without a face” shows well this double soul: the cello that appears to underline the melody does not appear as a simple tinsel, but as an integral part of a writing that seeks timbre shades without falling into self -implementation. There is a sense of measurement, a more marked balance than certain other recent experiments. The growl, while remaining harsh and ungraded, is today at the service of a system that no longer aims only to heaviness, but tries to transmit expressiveness and chiaroscuro.
Among the most curious episodes stands out then “Save a Prayer”: if it had not been openly announced as the Duran Duran cover, someone could really exchange it for an original song. The transposition in a hook Menace key is as linear as it is captivating, made possible by a metallization work that leads the piece to merge naturally with the rest of the disc. It is easy to imagine it also in the repertoire of the Lost Paradise, so much is in line with a certain agile and melodic taste that the Halifax group has explored in several phases of its career. Moreover, the riffs emerge clearly, harmonizations have space to resonate and the rarer moments find the necessary breath without seeming empty.
Those who regret the times of “Never Cross the Dead” will be able to consider this path a detour and continue looking in the old, grandiose, album that most visceral darkness. But for those who have followed the Hooded Menace also in their progressive metamorphosis, “Lachrymose Monuments of Obscurazione” represents another inviting stop: a mature, competitive job, constructed with attention to detail and strong of a consistency that today allows the band to assert itself not only as the custodian of the Doom, but as an original interpreter of a metal with arcane colors and increasingly wider breath. Growth does not go from revolutions, but from a constant chisel that led the trio to an identity today punctually recognizable and credible.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
