October 20, 2016 | , | 4

Hooded Menace, Darkness Drips Forth

Hooded Menace: Darkness Drips Forth

Four songs. That’s all you get with Hooded Menace’s latest full-length, but have no fear, these four tracks weigh in at a mighty 42 minutes in run time. Each packed to the rotten gills with more than enough death/doom to reanimate the dead, albeit slowly.

Crawling, lurching and morosely slow riffage dominates the album as hints of melody ooze from wailing guitars in the distance. Vocally, the group is just as guttural as ever as Pyykko vomits forth tales of purgatory, decomposing flesh and the writhing darkness after death. Opening track ”Blood for the Burning Oath / Dungeons of the Disembodied” carries the heavy weight of ominous despair while melancholic guitars come and go amongst the monolithic, buzzing riffage. The awesomely entitled “Elysium of Dripping Death” is about as old school as you can get, leaving behind oozing, festering gashes in the Earth as their grizzly rumble of doom/death moves forward, unstoppable and glacial.

Even only running a mere 9:47, “Ashen with Solemn Decay” is just as epic as the other three songs on Darkness Drips Forth. The song’s dueling guitars adds an extra bit of depth to its already full spectrum of doomy death goodness. Wrapping up this fourth full-length from these Finnish death/doom dealers is “Beyond Deserted Flesh,” a track that picks up more on the death than the doom, but still packs plenty of dark despair amongst its rolling drums and wailing leads.

Hooded Menace know how to write some killer as hell metal and these four songs simply solidify their ability to move the genre forward while still giving a nod to the old school. Darkness Drips Forth isn’t as filthy or grimey as it sounds, but it’ll surely pull you into its foreboding chasm of doom with ease.