Band:	Officium Triste
Album:	Hortus Venenum
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	September 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Behind Closed Doors
02. My Poison Garden
03. Anna's Woe
04. Walk In Shadows
05. Forcefield
06. Angels With Broken Wings

Thirty years of sorrow. Here's another Officium Triste celebrating a landmark anniversary by delivering another offering of melancholic doom.

I am perhaps not the best person to review this record. I don't have that much history with Officium Triste, and my reviewing habits often take me to either bands that I have history with, or that are doing something intriguing, usually by blending genres or having a specific concept. Sure, exceptions are abound, and Officium Triste is a band I thoroughly enjoy, and death doom is also a style I've had my fair share of. But explaining why this album by this band in a genre that's not exactly known for being adventurous is working as well as it does, that's quite a challenge for me. Normally I would've just passed this one along to bigger afficionados by the genres, if it wasn't for the fact that this is the same band that released The Death Of Gaia.

I spoke half truths when I mentioned my lack of history with the band. I was familiar with them before that album dropped, but it was the first one where it really hit me how good Officium Triste are at what they are doing. That's also when I saw them live (and photographed them. I'm sure part of it is the "right place, right time" thing, and not much is fundamentally changes this time around either, the band even keeping the same lineup they had between albums. I don't necessarily feel the same exalted feelings with Hortus Venenum because I already know how good Officium Triste are at what they are doing. Of course I want more of that, but it will never have the same instantaneous impact.

Please try not to read that as something negative about Hortus Venenum, bands in their position in their genre, have failed to impress me. The goth rock touches of Obsidian might've, my history with the band for The Storm Within within might've, but albums like The Ghost Of Orion or On Thorns I Lay or The Cancer Pledge have passed through me without making any kind of impact. Even though I've consumed enough death doom to feed a small village, it can still have some impact, and Hortus Venenum only proves that. It's not only the genre's strengths in giving live to melancholy, but also Officium Triste's way of using those upbeat melodies to contrast with Pim's grief-striken growls is a combination that's just golden.

Hortus Venenum is a much leaner album than The Death Of Gaia, with its 41 minutes being more in line with some of the band's earlier albums, but the album doesn't feel too short for its own good. It fits just enough gloom and sorrow to sate the hunger for it. For the most part it does fit in the slow but not glacial pace that's commonplace in the style, so moments where the pace and intensity is picked up, like in "Forcefield" do stand out. Also figuring out that the emotional appeal of death doom's melancholy is a different emotional nuance to funeral doom's bleak despair did make more sense within the context of how upbeat the guitars and keys on Hortus Venenum can sound. This nuance of melancholy is not completely hopeless. And that's something I'm more prone to empathizing with that complete ruin.

Here's to many more gloomy years!