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Released on June 15, 2015 via Season of Mist
I just got back from a week in Finland, the spiritual home of funeral doom: listened to Tyranny on the bus, grabbed as many Profetus records as I could find, and caught a rare and heavy Skepticism show. So, on my return, the appearance of Shape of Despair’s latest album in my inbox was a welcome opportunity to extend the gloom.
Monotony Fields begins with extended keyboard tones sent out in advance, setting the scene and clearing the way for the incoming slow, crushing guitar smashes. Each chord slumps into the next like a line of ancient granite dominos, though they’re topped off with a sparkling plinking piano that’s reminiscent of the peaks of waves before they destroy themselves on the shore. It’s beyond the 5-minute mark before the vocals come in, trademark funeral doom subterranean growling very much like the bands mentioned above. But there’s a bit less anguished groan and a bit more firm-set stoicism here, and the banks of guitar lines become sort of energetic, even triumphant amidst the general maudlin atmosphere and pace.
Here and there the wafty, wordless, sliding female vocals add yet another mournful colour to the earthshaking riffs. But there’s a pleasing predictability to the fact that whenever these soar unaccompanied for a few moments, it’s only a matter of time before another heavy landslide buries you in low distortion. Even if sometimes, waiting around for the next chord is like waiting around for the next album: this is Shape of Despair’s first album in a decade. I’m personally not so fond of the plaintive, clean vocals on the third and fourth tracks: for me this style of music is about evoking an unimaginably sombre world. So, the traditional corroded depth-charge vocals are preferable in adding to the atmosphere of incommunicable darkness (and I certainly don’t want to be able to understand the lyrics). Still, they’re well blended with the guitar and keys, and will likely appeal to adherents of the 40 Watt Sun school of doomy emotion.
Maybe the hardest hitting attacks are in the title track, where a heavy drop cuts into atmospheric drones and is shortly followed up by an unstoppable growl. But the record overflows with many other great moments of heaviness, the reverberating hits of distorted downtuned noise leaving a trail of shadows and ice like the wandering Groke. It’s actually not that slow by the standards of the subgenre, but this is still doom propelled by low thudding chords that have time to make their impact felt, with the patterns of the riffs coming out more in repeated listens. At 74 minutes, it’s a long album, but the combination of subtle harmonic details with the sheer power of the slow riffs keeps things moving, unstoppable like the tide, inevitable like the sun swinging around the Helsinki horizon.
