Shape Of Despair
Illusion's Play

This band perhaps shows more than anything else, and without easy and grotesque flattery, how caustic and dark the path can be for every human being along the line of their life. In this specific case, "miserable." And it's not at all an easy euphemism, but rather a way to emphasize, once again, and if needed, the fatality of rational events, only those, bare and stripped of any reason for being and of any ancestral meaning, and how impossible and inevitable it is not to escape one's gruesome and distorted destiny, how abominable it is to be endowed with feelings and sensations, and not just beastly instincts.

Don't be fooled, if you're thinking that the concepts expressed so far are just nonsense, not even fit for a penny dreadful; you're wrong, and not by a little, and the Shape of Despair are here, now, within the grooves of their cruel and atrocious music, to explain it to you in the best and most tedious way possible.

There is no light in this album, except for some sketched glimmers that deviate from the black color that pervades every corner, to take refuge in an impervious gray, and in a little reassuring Dark and Ambient minimalism that can only transport you even further from the mephistophelic mazes of vile and sad intentions, only to throw you back in forcefully, and without you being able to cultivate, in your heart, even the faintest hope of survival.
Darkness that generates only more darkness. And it's not a good thing, certainly not when you consider that these Finns, despite producing and playing music that is aptly dubbed "Funeral Doom" that could easily be judged from top to bottom by the production it perpetuates, and being among its undisputed protagonists, strike always and only where it hurts the most, where wounds are still fresh with blood that refuses to clot, where tears and useless cries dwell, lost in a shocking grave-like silence.

Though having abandoned, but only in part, that masochistic taste for pain and its raw and tomb-like interpretation that characterized the previous "Angels of Distress," here Shape of Despair decide to surrender to the subdued and muddled side of fear, of death, of simply being nothing but evanescent dust that gets lost in the damp sleep of the autumn fog, almost bordering in some respects on the purest and most claustrophobic Gothic, the kind that, just to say, sparked the success of the first beloved Anathema and Paradise Lost.
Songs to be forced to remember that you're powerless; boulders rolling in the mute and silent Hell of indifference, sometimes clashing loudly against one's own nihilism, sometimes stumbling through intricate, subjective, and intimate paths that ultimately show only one way, the one that inevitably leads to moral and physical decay, which includes no return backdoor unless those, canonical and exhausting, of Death.

It's useless and superfluous to talk about the songs one by one. It's simply wasted effort, because this work represents a monolithic and homogeneous mass of sound, in all its facets tinged to the utmost of tar and poisoned thorns.
Even the voices, the "grunts" as they are called here, the work of Pasl Koskinen (ex Amorphis and ex Ajattara) are a corollary to the pervasive, subtle yet poisonous mood of the band, adding, in addition, that exponential dose of alienation necessary for everything to seem immobile, undone, finished, without any human weight. But even the female voice (the work of Natalie Koskinen) which, on some occasions acts as a counterweight to the unbearable horror (as in "Still-Motion"), is an integral part. Not surprisingly, in my opinion, the most successful episodes are precisely those in which the unlikely duo mixes and confuses their characteristics, never knowing where one begins and the other ends ("Curse Life"), nor where other instrumental parts will lead ("Illusion's Play"), or even what, precisely, they want to clearly convey in their slow and abominable cadence.

Clearly not, because then, among the numerous and indented lines of the long tracks (and it couldn't be otherwise), it becomes very clear what is always tended towards: the Limit; the thin boundary that marks the beginning without word and without ears and the tragic and convoluted end of everything mobile or immobile in the world.

No compromises, then. Nothing that might resemble revenge or a desire to hope, once again, only nightmare and destiny, to embroider a dark and twilight tale that lasts a good hour and will uproot those who listen to it from any security and any futile and fleeting serenity. Let it pervade you. It will truly be worth it, and maybe you too will consume your soul by pining and amusing yourselves in dreams of amorphous creatures without a semblance of anger, thinking with a smile that they are just, precisely, images born of your imagination, but as soon as you open your eyes, you'll recognize them as your own, looking in the mirror of your character, and realizing, in the end, that it is useless to desire, love, hope, laugh, and rejoice, as time, sooner or later, will lead you to the inevitable destiny of which the Shape of Despair are the hosts.