Bandcamp Everything you need to know about Hooded Menace is on the cover: hooded specters with drawn swords, a weeping tombstone effigy, bats scattering across a bruised violet sky, all rendered in loving old-school horror-paperback style. Since 2007 the Finns have been the reliable purveyors of exactly this, death-doom built from Cathedral riffs and Paradise Lost melancholy and a deep love of Italian gore cinema. Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration, their seventh, keeps the aesthetic intact while quietly shifting the balance of the music inside it.
The shift is toward melody and momentum. This is a death-doom record where the emphasis has crept from the doom to the death, and specifically to the twin-guitar tradition: “Lugubrious Dance” and “Save a Prayer” are carried by harmonized leads with a genuinely classic, almost NWOBHM sense of melody, guttural vocals sitting legible on top, the rhythm section swinging rather than dragging. The craft is not in question anywhere here. The guitar layering is precise and widescreen, the growls cut cleanly, and when the band want to open a song up they do it well, “Into Haunted Oblivion” closing the record on real dynamic range, an atmospheric break and a spoken-word hush before a last solo, mastered with room to breathe rather than bricked flat.
What gives me pause is a certain sameness of surface. Several of the middle tracks share a compact, mid-focused, sample-assisted drum sound that reads a little synthetic and thin in the low end, and for a doom band the record rarely commits to the crushing, funereal slowness that made their early work feel like being buried alive. It walks where it once crawled. That is a legitimate artistic choice, and the melodies are strong enough to justify it, but purists who came for tectonic weight may find this a lighter, brisker Hooded Menace than they remember.
Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration is a confident, tuneful, expertly made record from a band who know exactly what they are and have earned the right to bend it. If you want your death-doom mournful but moving, with hooks you can hum under the graveyard fog, it delivers cleanly. If you want to be flattened, revisit the back catalogue. Either way the specters on that cover are in good hands.
Melodic death-doom that leans harder on the death and the twin-guitar tradition than on crushing slowness. “Lugubrious Dance” and “Save a Prayer” ride harmonized, almost NWOBHM-classic leads with legible growls over a rhythm section that swings rather than drags, and “Into Haunted Oblivion” closes on genuine dynamic range, an atmospheric break and spoken-word hush before a final solo, mastered with room to breathe. The reservations: several middle tracks share a compact, mid-focused, sample-assisted drum sound that reads a little synthetic and thin in the subbass, and for a doom band it rarely commits to the funereal, tectonic slowness of their earlier work. Precise, widescreen guitar layering throughout, occasional 2 to 4 kHz stacking at full load. Tuneful graveyard metal that walks where it once crawled.
Standout tracks: Into Haunted Oblivion, Lugubrious Dance, Save a Prayer
