Hooded Menace - Effigies Of Evil
. . .
Death and doom are the chocolate and peanut butter of metal; pretty good on their own, but slap that shit together and you get a mouth-gasm. If Hooded Menace’s new album was a salty sweet treat, Reese’s would patent it faster than you can say “crawling chaos Nyarlathotep”.
Enough food metaphors: Effigies Of Evil, released on September 11, is a menacing, relentless slab of riffs and swirling space. The 10-plus minute opener “Vortex Macabre” sets the album in motion, combining creepy atmospherics with the band’s signature oppressive progressions. There is a tendency for death-doom bands to lose the plot, which is only natural when the kick and snare are spaced 5 seconds apart. Hooded Menace have never fallen into this trap, and Effigies is proof. The riffs never wander; indeed, most of the main passages more closely resemble cinematic themes than metal chugging. It’s not hard to envision the undead creeps from Burial Ground or the Blind Dead staggering to the strains of “In The Dead We Dwell”. Even when the band speeds things up, it only lasts about as long as a victim staggering through pitch-black cemetery markers.
That’s not to say headbang-able moments are absent here. “Curses Scribed in Gore” comes roaring out of the gate with some serious Autopsy worship, and “Evoken Vulgarity” might have more groove than any other Hooded Menace song to date. Flourishes of psychedelic guitar pop up there and also on “Crumbling Insanity”, further proof of the band’s affinity for ’70s horror. Within their dynamics, Goblin and John Carpenter are just as important to a song’s tone as Entombed or Dismember.
The lack of a badass horror movie theme cover is disappointing, but it’s a trifling complaint. There is enough evil at work here to satisfy any metal fan into dank crypts, ghost ships, and mind trips.
. . .
HEAR EFFIGIES OF EVIL
BUY EFFIGIES OF EVIL
Relapse Records (CD, 2xLP)
Bandcamp (Digital download)
. . .
