After their successful debut album "The Art Of Grief" (2000), Dutch gothic wave band "The Wounded" is back with a new full-length album entitled "Monument". "The Wounded" can best be compared with "The Cure" and the latter work of "Anathema". The music can be categorised as dark melancholic and melodic. Beautiful keyboard lines over solid guitar chords and emotional crying-like vocals. "Monument" starts off with an intro followed by a killer first song "Garland". This is followed by a somewhat less appealing track "The Real". Then they come back strong again with "Grace, Murder, Divine", "Billet Doux" and "Chaos Spectacle"; with the latter one sounding very much like an "Anathema" song. However the album loses some of its strength halfway through as the songs turn more to the darker side and become more boring.

Maybe 12 songs of melancholy are just too much. People who are into this kind of music would probably disagree but after 30 minutes, this album needs a more up-tempo track, otherwise you dose off. The last track takes up 20 minutes of the entire album, but this is again one of those songs with 2 minutes of rain and 7 minutes of silence on the end followed by some spoken words from television and what appears to be a slamming mouse trap which kills the mouse, from a popular German children`s program on television titled "Die Sendung mit der Maus". In all, good quality and nice songs but a bit too long (almost 70 minutes), and the album loses some of its power halfway.