Band:	Shape Of Despair
Album:	Angels Of Distress
Style:	Funeral doom metal
Release date:	2001

01. Fallen
02. Angels Of Distress
03. Quiet These Paintings Are
04. ...To Live For My Death...
05. Night's Dew

I wonder if anybody's ever gonna beat Shape Of Despair as far as heaviness and slowness are concerned... Seldom have I heard something slower than Angels Of Distress. Slower than that would be going backwards. Shape Of Despair or the art of playing riffs that last four minutes each... Now I know what funeral doom is supposed to be.

Angels Of Distress is actually almost an instrumental album, enhanced with ethereal female vocals and occasional growls scattered here and there. The singers are great but they're of course not the main interest. What we damned metalheads who fell in the doom cauldron (not long ago in my case) like in Shape Of Despair is their ability to create North Pole-like atmospheres. The intro of the album, 'Fallen', and its six minutes of brain-crushing yet subtle riffs says it all. Majestic keyboards, surreal female vocals,yearning violins and eventually some growlings who come to spit all the sadness of the world to your face, you get the idea, this is ice-cold beauty we are talking about, full of emotions and eager to bury every poor lost soul that dares venture in these barren moors, the kind of beauty that since then has inspired bands llike Swallow The Sun for example.

For the song 'Angels Of Distress', take the same recipe, add some more relentlessly depressing violins, and get ready for the next masterpiece. 'Quiet These Paintings Are' is indeed the central piece of the album, the final solution against all forms of happiness, joy and love. It's the kind of song that defines a whole genre. The melancholic keyboards, the weeping violins and the sorrowful vocals are all lost in an ocean of sadness and despair... The highlight of the album and one of the best songs I've ever heard. Finally, 'Night's Dew' is the only 'fast' song here, an excellent mid-paced instrumental to close wonderfully the album.

So before my soul dies, these are my last words: Shape Of Despair is now one of the best doom bands around. Angels Of Distress is simply an almost perfect album, a must-have for doom fans. For everybody. It is unique.