The Return to Nothing is (like the aforementioned Doom VS album) utterly exquisite funeral doom of the highest order. The music is stoic, majestic, and utterly crawling; stepping on the same paths bands like Anathema, Paradise Lost, and (most notably) My Dying Bride walked before them, My Shameful go even slower and with much more crushing force. This thick gravitas weighs on your troubled soul immediately as "This Same Grey Light" begins its instantly recognizable clean guitar note plucks. As the song kicks down doors with its incredibly massive wall-of-sound riffing, a funeral procession of stately, epic, and immersive doom/death ambles by with sinister leisure. The equally powerful "Days Grow Darker" sounds like the final convulsions of a hanging victim; the song yanks and jerks with spastic bursts of furious trudge amidst gloomy plod. Frontman (or is it cryptkeeper?) Sami Rautio has utterly inhumane growls, and the song itself is major league material. "No Dawn" has spacial, moody intro hums before the greater nihilism that is its body of sludge. There is unbelievable depth to the amount of titanic riffing here, and excellent doom/death all around. Title track "The Return to Nothing" sounds for all the world like My Dying Bride on some serious barbituates, and as the song crumbles into dusty and depressing clean chords devoid of any vibrancy, you'll long for the mercy of oblivion upon your brow. This destruction comes later on, as an absolutely homicidal riff falls from the sky and turns your quivering corpse into putrid jelly. "It Can't Get Worse" ironically proves it can, with the band taking their trademark (and by now) unwavering funeral dirges and making it even larger, darker, and danker. The mind-blowing "Silent" is easily the best song here. Blackened wings of mourning melodies soar in as the song begins; all of it builds into a perfect hang-nail riff festival the likes of which is the most headbangingly wicked section of doom on the entire disc. "Just One" sounds in a sentence like Atlas dropping the world after a gargantuan struggle. A crazy solo eventually builds into one of the most technically marvelous moments of the album, and the disc explodes into a final fireball of graceful funeral doom before the quaint acoustic interlude that is "Untitled" polishes things off.

To sum things up, My Shameful are an insanely young band (formed in merely 2001 actually) who have taken funeral doom/death to dizzingly new lows on this album. Perfectly capturing the apathy, despair, nihilism, and misanthropy that made the original purveyors of the genre so great, this is a band to watch in the coming years. From what research I was able to find, Firedoom is intending to keep the band on for one-two more full lengths, so this isn't the last we've heard of these guys. All-in-all, an excellent album for funeral doom fanatics and definitely nothing to be Shameful of.