Band:	Distress
Album:	The Mourning Sign
Style:	Gothic doom metal
Release date:	2004
A review by:	Jeff

01. Reflectionless
02. I've Seen
03. Beyond The Cross Of Guilt
04. Your Turn (Beneath The Black Sun)
05. Another Babylon
06. Delirium Tremens
07. As The Summers Died
08. The XI th Hour
09. Sinking Into Oblivion
10. Crawling In Sanity (The Victim)

There are not a lot of really famous Doom bands from France. But through the years and their new productions, Distress is becoming more and more important in the French Metal scene. The reason, you can certainly understand it easily, comes from the fact that this band knows how make music which becomes more and more interesting with each release. And once more, this is the case with "The Mourning Sign," the last album of the band. A great mix of Doom and Death metal, which shows us that this combo is now an important one of the French Metal scene.

Distress plays Doom metal but not with as slow a tempo as bands like Shape Of Despair or Mourning Beloveth. In fact the music of Distress is mixed with some parts of Death Metal, and if you want an idea of their style of music, well I could compare it to an Anathema, period "Silent Enigma." "The Mourning Sign" is a really good album because the songs are very well written and more than catchy. It's not easy for a Doom band to make music that all the listeners will find at the first listening to be interesting and catchy, but this is no problems for Distress, and it certainly comes from the talent of the musicians. Good guitars with excellent riff, good lines of bass and drums, and some excellent clean and death vocals, by their singer. No really, it's hard to find something wrong with this guys. The album don't suffer from of a lot of problems, maybe only the sound can be a bit disappointing because sometime it's not very well mixed [for the drums]. But in general all is ok, and as I said before there are some little jewels of composition in this album. The lyrics, for example (and it's an important point that they are well done), are also well written for the music. Sadness, and despair and all this really beautiful text which do that I like more and more this Metal style which is, in my opinion, the more innovative and original of the Metal Scene of nowadays.
Same for the artwork of the cd which are very well done and in the pure tradition of Doom Metal?

"The Mourning Sign" is a great album, I hope for the band that they could have in the future some better means of productions, this is not bad don't worry, but it could be better and in that case this album could be a real masterpiece. But however you could see it yourself, this is not really disturbing and at the end this is a real good album of Doom Metal. If you like this music, "The Mourning Sign" is a must have.