Does the name Catamenia sound familiar to you? Well, it definitely should because they’ve been around since 1995 and already released 5 studio albums since the debut “Halls Of Frozen North” back in 1998. “Winternight Tragedies” is the 6th album from this Finnish melodic black metal outfit and a few line-up changes have occurred since the last release. Gone are vocalist Mika Tönning and bassist Timo Lehtinen and new in the band are O.J. Mustonen and Mikko Hepo-oja.

The first thing that I noticed differs from earlier Catamenia albums is that the keyboards were used a lot less. You can hear them in a couple of songs but most of the time they stay way back in the mix. Often you can’t even hear them at all unless there’s a “calmer” part of a song. The bass is almost more audible than the keyboards. The main focus here is on the drums and vocals. I would have wished for the guitars to be a little more up-front instead for the drums.

The musicianship is very tight. It sure shows that Catamenia has been around for a long time and become skilled with their instruments. I was quite impressed by drummer Veikko Jumisko’s performance here. His drumming on this album is better than on Chaosborn and he comes up with more interesting fills and drum-patterns. The new vocalist Mustonen sounds very much like Tönning did but he does a good job nonetheless. There are few clean vocals parts on this album (most prominent in the ultra-catchy chorus of ‘Verikansa’) but 90% are your typical black metal rasps.

The biggest drawback with this album is that the songs are too similar to each other. This has always been the case with Catamenia; they manage to write a couple of really kickass songs on each album but the rest of the songs vary from above average to mediocre. On “Winternight Tragedies” we have killer tracks such as ‘Verikansa’, ‘Strength and Honor’, ‘Iced Over’ & ‘The Heart of Darkness’ while the other tracks are quite similar to these but not quite as good. There’s also a cool cover of Satyricon’s ‘Fuel For Hatred’ as the album closer.

I’m sure that if this was the first Catamenia album I heard I would have thought it was totally awesome but since I’m familiar with their earlier stuff I would’ve liked to hear them evolve their sound further and experiment some more. I know they have the potential to release a real masterpiece someday if they could bring their stuff together and sort out only the very best tracks and throw away the rest.

If you’re a fan of the more melodic black metal acts out there and haven’t checked out Catamenia yet then this album is a good place to start. The album has it’s flaws but overall the good outweighs the bad. An interesting thing to note is that all Catamenia albums so far has featured wolves on the album cover. Will they continue this tradition or not? Only the future can tell…

[This review was first published on the now defunct scandinavianmetal.info webzine]

Distributed in Denmark and kindly suplied by VME