Band:	Shape Of Despair
Album:	Shape Of Despair
Style:	Funeral doom metal
Release date:	August 2005

01. Sleeping Murder
02. Night's Dew
03. Sylvan-Night
04. Quiet These Paintings Are
05. Woundheir
06. To Adorn
07. In The Mist

A year after the amazing "Illusion's Play", the Finnish funeral doomsters Shape Of Despair are back and along with them the ebon veil of darkness and solitude comes, once again, in the surface of the subconscious of the listener, there where they were drowning silently, waiting for the right moment to scatter on the ground their oblivious petals.

"Shape Of Despair" is the name of their new release, but beware, it's not a new full-length album, it's more something like a compilation of demo versions of the songs that gave life in the most appropriate way to the 3, so far, full-length releases of the band, featuring also a brand new composition that is, probably, showing the musical pathways on which Shape Of Despair will walk on in the near future.

"Sleeping Murder" is the name of the new composition and it's more upbeat (well, don't imagine something overdone, it's funeral doom we're talking about) and it is really good and inspired, yet, not something that will leave you speechless, like the compositions that follow in this compilation. The demo versions have vivid differences from the ones being in the full-length Shape Of Despair albums, differences that a fan of the band can easily realize. The hymn "Quiet These Paintings Are", one of the most doleful compositions I have ever heard, is present, along with the imposing melancholy and esoteric beauty of the instrumental "Night's Dew", whose lyrical/vocal silence is being surpassed in the most appropriate way by its fabulous melodies.

Of course the, in a serene way, nightmarish opuses that lie in the mist and the scattered withered asphodels, "Sylvan-Night" and "Woundheir", the utterly imposing, eerily beauteous and majestic "To Adorn" and the dynamic and freezing "In The Mist" couldn't be missing, making the album flow beautifully, surrounding the listener in utterly emotional and deep ways. The production of "Sleeping Murder" is remarkable, yet, the production of the demo versions of the rest compositions is either good or average, but still, oddly, it adds to the dreary and gloomy feeling of the songs making them sound more? desperate.

This release refers mainly to the fans of Shape Of Despair, the rest of you that continued reading this review and didn't run to the hills to save themselves when they read the term "funeral doom" and would like to know the band it would be best for them, I think, to approach first the monuments of emotional art bearing the names "Shades Of?" and "Angels Of Distress". Caress the shape of despair?

"To live for my death?"