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| Cover art by Adam Burke. |
Hooded Menace's new LP grabbed me from the first riff. On Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed they dive deep into doom and gloom creating a slab of devastating Gothic tinged death doom laced with melody and dripping with atmosphere. It's the aural equivalent of a decaying manor, once stately rooms still as death, their lace hangings decayed and still, layers of grime hiding the once grand trappings.
The album opens with the two guitars building a slow melody, the kind that usually lasts a few seconds before thundering into a massive HM-2 powered Swedeath riff. But in "Sempiternal Grotesqueries" the riff slowly builds, then morphs into another plodding melodic riff before it picks up into a death stomp.
For a 40 minute record Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed is delightfully unhurried, reveling in every grotesque riff and lingering lead. Despite the pace there's never a dull moment. Tempos vary from funeral doom to slightly more mid-tempo and dual guitar interplay morphs into tomb-shaking death and even into some stomping deathrock riffs with slightly shimmering almost clean leads.
Though most of the members changed since the last album the band is and always has been Lasse Pyykkö's project with him writing and arranging all the material. The vocalist is new which changes the sound a bit, but musically it fits the band's catalog, just a deeper down the Gothic doom rabbit hole. It sounds like Ghost's take on death doom, and indeed it was mixed and mastered by Jaime Gomez Arellano who handled Ghost's Opus Eponymous. The rest of the presentation fits the Gothic shift. Tracks, and indeed the album itself could have been named by an AI picking the most Gothic words in the most Gothic sequence.
The production, for the most part, is excellent and enhances the atmoshere. The drums are thunderous and the guitar tone, just a hair below "Sunlight Studios", is devastating on riffs and darkly pretty on leads. The master, though is quite loud and it does clip occasionally. It's not hugely problematic but an album of such massive songs deserves a more dynamic master like Vainaja's vinyl masters.
With Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed Hooded Menace have created a record with everything I didn't know I wanted from death doom. Longtime fans should also be pleased as the band hasn't drastically altered their sound, simply improving the formula they had already laid down.
[Note: in September, at the Kill-Town Death Fest 2018, you can hear Hooded Menace dig into the past and play their 2008 debut Fulfill the Curse.]