The Tritonus Bell

Finish death metallers Hooded Menace only recently came to my attention because of their latest release The Tritonus Bell. Little to my knowledge, they actually have a pretty hefty back catalog that brought them to where we are now. Being on Relapse before entering Season Of Mist, they’ve bred themselves out of the doom/death parents without stepping too deep into the cavernous howls of the unsettling kind. In other words, it’s actually rather accessible for its style.

A lot of this is likely due to the fact that it’s pretty melodic. But what’s nice is they disperse this into different melody formats instead of allowing itself to fall under “melodeath” by using horrible guitar tones and generic writing. Some songs take the galloping riff approach, others are gonna grab the leads and hoist them above the mix. Hell, even the vocals feel like they rely a little more on clarity than you would expect, which says a lot. Picture something along the lines of Amon Amarth but without the Norse bells (ha) and whistles.

What tops The Tritonus Bell off is the band working these in and out in phases to make for longer songs where every part is necessary. You could argue that “Blood Ornaments” didn’t need to be nine minutes, but I respectfully disagree. (At least) three different times it strays into either a solo, a bridge, or a melodic tangent that feels organic before returning to that galloping hook. “Corpus Asunder” takes a similar route but starts off with the leads and introduces a monstrous bass-heavy crawl. Speaking of bass, get a load of its full fury on "Scattered Into Dark." Funnily enough, the shortest of the bulk “Those Who Absorb The Night” actually hits the doom aspect on the head the heaviest.

Have we heard stuff like this before? Absolutely, and maybe some of it could have been trimmed back. But nothing about this is blatantly much, and I definitely dig it. As someone who really dives deep into the moist depths of this genre in its most extreme form, a change of pace is nice. Five tracks of thunderous melodies caked under a burning umbrella with quick endcaps makes for a fine time!

Originally written for Metal Inferno