Finnish death-laced doom metal band Hooded Menace's style-- that is, horror-- might be more important than their sound. They aim to bridge 1990s death metal menace and the arch and stomp of early doom dudes, but that's almost the sidecar; their name is lifted from Amando de Ossorio's classic 70s Blind Dead series, their cover art depicts cross-shaped tombstones, maligned skulls and ghouls on the hunt for souls, and their music features film samples about vampires and vivified corpses. "There's no Hooded Menace without horror. It wouldn't be the same," multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Lasse Pyykkö said in a 2010 interview, articulating the obvious. "We all dig horror films from the past and find it a vast source of inspiration."
On two previous full-lengths and a bevy of splits, such inspiration has served as kindling for Hooded Menace's music, giving their lurch a primal and welcome urgency. But on this year's Effigies of Evil, Pyykkö and Pekka Koskelo's debut for Relapse Records, such aesthetic influence overrides the music itself; that is, these eight tracks often seem more like attempts to convey the pair's gruesome obsessions than to make a memorable metal record. Pyykkö has long talked about how the sinister atmospheres and wretched images and sounds of horror films fit Hooded Menace, but Effigies of Evil often feels like an attempt to fit the band to those qualities, to force these winding doom riffs into unnecessarily unbecoming directions. The result is often more mawkish than scary. "Summoned Into Euphoric Madness", for instance, offers the creation myth of a wolfman, or, as Pyykkö roars by way of unmemorable refrain, the "legend of the lycanthrope." But his tendency to growl the lyrics and distend the syllables-- you know, like a legitimate wolf-- seems mostly inane, a distraction from the song's otherwise brilliant cascade of riffs and powerful march toward the end. The same holds for "Curses Scribed in Gore", a rhythm-and-pitch-bending marathon that rumbles heavily enough for three minutes before settling into an instrumental bridge ostensibly meant to sound creepy. It lands much closer to goofy. And again, so it goes with the corpse-prodding "Crumbling Insanity", in which Pyykkö goes for full zombie vocals above a funerary guitar line-- that's after a sample about the rising dead, mind you. If this all sounds more scary than silly, please beware of totally terrifying things like hobgoblins and bugaboos.
Considering that it's creation was so fueled by film, Effigies of Evil feels strangely more episodic than cinematic. Hooded Menace are the kind of act that demands a concept album, with transposable threads spread throughout the record, tying the horror show together for an inescapable hour. They've teamed here again with the lyrical partnership of Tanya Sim and Kevin Campbell (Pyykkö has long been clear about his distaste for writing lyrics); taken by themselves, their stanzas of creatures seeking "unholy rebirth" or overlords out for "torture and mutilation" are where the horror show actually finds its payload. But Pyykkö's decision to eviscerate the lyrics with the lowest bellow he can manage means they largely only work in the liner notes. The words get little support from the music, either, hidebound as Hooded Menace are to song-length bursts of brutality that flicker and soon disappear. This record feels as much defined by its exits as its overwhelming sense of anything.
In another 2010 interview for That's How Kids Die, Pyykkö was asked whether, given his obsessions and inspirations, he'd ever considered making scores for horror movies. Pyykkö claimed incompetence, saying that, despite being the person who writes Hooded Menace's music and plays everything but drums on each record, he's also a lousy keyboard player. "It's a pity that I suck at keys," he said. "Horror keyboards would rule and if you really could play piano it damn surely would help." Effigies of Evil feels very much like Hooded Menace's attempt to subvert the question, to create their own horror shorts within their music rather than using their music to score them. Occasionally, a few riffs sit memorably, and a few shifts in structure are notably unorthodox, even for these Candlemass adherents. But overall, the reach required for that grasp is still beyond their means and methods, turning all their attempts at being dire into a looming cloud of indifference. This time around, perhaps Hoodied Menace would be more apt.
