Hooded Menace’s third album, “Effigies of Evil”, sees the band make another label move for a full-length release, this time from Profound Lore over to Relapse Records. In many ways the label moves are indicative of the strides the band has made as entities to themselves in the doom scene. While second album “Never Cross The Dead” came out just over two years ago, the Finnish duo of Lasse Pyykkö and Pekka Koskelo have not, in any way, been reclusive, releasing four splits with bands from Ilsa to Asphyx.
“Effigies of Evil” is another supremely impressive outing for the Finns, being a severely heavy and coarse affair, dripping with melancholy and misanthropy. A sleek production job hasn’t tampered with the band’s rawness in any way, thankfully. If anything, the murky din has been given more room to breed its wretched spawn. The band has always straddled a line between doom metal and more mid-paced death metal, much from the Scandinavian school of thought. Leaning more towards the doom side though, the band still allows the flourishes of death to creep in in significant doses that always keep the murky doom interesting. Opener, the ten minute epic, “Vortex Macabre” really captures the album’s essence straight away, crawling to and from slow doomed out verses and pacier, heavy riff-oriented passages.
Meanwhile, “In The Dead We Dwell” is a crushing exercise in doom, crawling at a lecherous snail’s pace. Vocally, Lasse is on fine form. His guttural growls mesh with the imposing guitars to thrilling effect, but it’s his guitar work that really steals the show in Hooded Menace, peeling off countless invigorating riffs and solos that complement the clamour so well but he doesn’t allow his vocals to be overshadowed either, striking a healthy balance.
“Crumbling Insanity” has some of the album’s most bracing lead guitars, meanwhile “Summoned Into Euphoric Madness” is riddled with some strange and unnerving grooves in the opening riffs. The album flows quite well but you could easily pull out one of these eight songs from the tracklist and it stands up just as powerfully on its own. “Evoken Vulgarity” starts to pull the curtains down on this affair with some seriously gloomy lead guitar work that eventually leads into the short and dreary closer track “Retribution in Eternity”, thus bringing this record to a suitable end.
“Effigies of Evil” is released on September 11th through Relapse Records and pre-orders are available now.
Doomrider
July 27, 2012 at 11:45 am
nice review, just listened to Effigies of Evil, very impressive stuff, pre-ordered a copy from Relapse.
now just waiting for Coffins to come out