(This is the second subpart of a fourth installment in DGR’s effort to catch up on reviews of 2019 releases he wants to recommend, with this 3-part fourth post devoted to melodic death metal. Today the subject is the debut full-length by the German band Fading Aeon, which was released on July 5th.)
At five songs and over forty minutes of material — with the Bandcamp download including an instrumental version of the title song if you really want to stretch — it was initially hard to place what exactly Fading Aeon’s A Warriors Tale was going to sound like. A Warrior’s Tale was released on the group’s Bandcamp in July, but became a victim of circumstance on my end and thus became a late-in-the-year discovery — one of the longer waits of any of these groups to become part of this review round up.
The three-piece could have been any number of things, with song lengths that stretched well into the nine-minute range, although their album art and logo suggested they probably weren’t a doom band. With a name like A Warrior’s Tale, my best guess would’ve been the sort of keyboard-and-guitar-interplay-heavy, folk-melodeath of a group like Wintersun. I seem to find one band every year that is really good that also really loves that particular slice of the melodeath scene and has absorbed heavy influence from it.
After a lot of listens to A Warrior’s Tale I can say that I was partly right, as Fading Aeon are an epic melodeath band, heavy on the keys and long song lengths — but not so reliant on speed as one might expect, instead favoring an approach that makes this trio sound massive, and with a pleasant surprise on the vocal front to boot. Continue reading »
