Shape of Despair
Angels of Distress

There are thresholds of pain that one should never wish for anyone to experience.
There are pathways on dark roads, lashed by rain and cold, desperate and introverted, passive and subjective, that we would never want to tread, nor even remotely imagine.
There are atrocious demons that delight in tormenting the perfectible human being with senses and passions that have the genes of abomination and death.

All these things are the hidden and ancestral fears that each of us conceals in our hearts and within the nervous tangles of our minds. But the Shape of Despair have chosen to bring them into the open and exorcise them in the most cruel and suffocating way possible; and there is no glimmer of light, not even the faintest, nor the remotest, to illuminate the musical paths of this Scandinavian band, among the forefront of what many call "Funeral Doom."

To describe the tempos as being slow would be to call them fast, terrifying growls over bizarre and changing rhythmic structures: from powerful and super distorted riffs to simple and sublime piano touches, drowned in the densest fog of an October dawn.
This is Shape of Despair, and with this work, as far as I'm concerned, they secure the title of the band that makes the listener most uncomfortable; and I assure you that, as far as I'm concerned, there are very few bands of this kind that I know.
My Dying Bride, certainly, in their lyricism and their eternal romantic and decadent sadness, Slayer, too, in their murderous ferocity and latent cruelty, Opeth, as well, in their thorny purgatories like wild roses, in lifeless foggy plains; and then, also Shape Of Despair: fear, resignation, Despair, darkness, nothing, nothing, nothing, and there's nothing good still in what they play.

The album consists of only five songs, among which I highlight the two "pillars": "Quiet These Paintings Are" and "Angel of Distress", for their incredibly unbearable sensation of atmospheric discomfort that they manage to evoke; for a plunge into the deepest oblivion, of a senseless sleep populated by amorphous creatures ready only to engulf you in the meanders of despair and death.

Incredible, but recommended only to those who are not suicidal. You've been warned.