Shape of Rex Factoria Films

Issued by underground imprint RCA Neon in mid-1971, the Shape Of The Rain album “Riley Riley Wood & Waggett” sold poorly at the time despite glowing reviews from the British music weeklies. A surging collision of Beatlesesque writing and harmonies and Byrds-like jingle-jangle guitars, sadly it would take another couple of decades before the LP was finally disinterred by a new generation of record collectors.

There are few funeral doom bands out there that manage to express sorrow and despair in such a majestic and beautiful manner as Finland's Shape Of Despair. The band’s latest full-length is a product of their environment, enveloping the listener in cold, eternal darkness like a lonely Finnish winter. And much like the long, funereal winters of their homeland, the atmosphere in ‘Return to the Void’ is bleak but ethereal. The funeral doom icons do not merely offer a soundtrack to one’s agony, but also demonstrate the beauty that can often be found in misery.