(DGR prepared the following extensive review of the third album, self-titled, by the German epic melodic death metal band Fading Aeon, which was released in March of this year.)
It seems if nothing else, 2026 is going to be the summoner of old ghosts for yours truly as we find ourselves once again cycling back to review a band that we started covering over seven years ago. Now, if you’ll please ignore the part that we’re coming up on the site being nearly-seventeen as well, a few of us are going to stand up and listen to our knees pop louder than the thunder and lightning shows that’ve been happening outside our windows recently. Is it any wonder we seem to attract groups that’ve taken long hiatuses between albums for new premieres?
Germany’s Fading Aeon are one of a fleet of three-piece melodeath groups that’ve appeared in the past decade – apparently they have little time for the bullshit of your standard four-to-five piece lineup – although they occupy a different musical sandbox than most, favoring epic tales of battle and heroism instead, with the song lengths to match. It hasn’t been uncommon for the Fading Aeon crew to release an album consisting of five songs and yet still have a run time sailing well over forty-minutes in range.
The group’s newest self-titled album, which saw release in mid-March, is no different in that regard. As the band have matured, so too has their songwriting ability, and while they started out incredibly ambitious, what has made Fading Aeon something to watch is how they’ve grown into the role that they sought out to start with.
photo by @stygian_moth
Many bands will start in one direction and then course-correct or pursue different paths as their careers have gone on, but Fading Aeon set out early on to write epic-length melodeath songs and each successive album has seen the group honing more and more on to that eventual goal. Their aforementioned newest self-titled album is the closest that the band have gotten yet.
Being three albums deep – and frankly, a lot of hours – into a band’s career has allowed for time to develop ritual in how we approach each Fading Aeon release. With five songs in hand (again) and a cup of coffee resting close by, Fading Aeon affords you time to think and turn introspective, which is not normally something metal asks of you, as much of our focus within the genre is an appeal to the combat instinct part of the brain. It is usually all catharsis, reflex, and subconscious emerging from the world of heavy metal, and if you have time to think about something, you have time to dig. The bands that meet this challenge head-on are usually their own particular brand of exciting, and with Fading Aeon and their own philosophical takes as part of the overall tale told on their new self-titled release, it is almost invited.
There exists a romantic notion of what Fading Aeon could become: Their tastes for folk-metal melodies and epic songcraft betray influence that could easily lead them on a path toward Enslaved, whereas the keys resting on the edge of any song reveal Dark Tranquillity’s goth-prog melodicisms entwining their way into a song, and there is an Opeth-esque taste for long tracks with multiple dynamic turns, plus Insomnium’s morose melancholy — all of that combining into something that could fully be called Fading Aeon.
Right now – and it may not even be what the band are aiming for – Fading Aeon exist as a clash of influences made to work by the determination and force of its three constituent parts. The combination is fun, and as mentioned before, each album has seen them steadily hone and refine their musical pursuits into something wholly identifiable as them. It just may not be exactly where they’re aiming yet, just where they are right now.
I could lay on a skateboard atop a hill in Seattle where I’m now visiting and push off, all dreams and glory of reaching the bottom and ending with a fantastical launch into the water. It is more likely I will wind up slamming face-first into the side of a car a quarter of the way down. What we make of the face-slamming is reflective of our maturity in any particular skill, such as the torturing of made-up allegory. This has not been the glorious launch stuntman style into the water one might imagine, but instead the sudden impact into the side of a building. Fading Aeon are not yet that brilliant combination of influences that they could easily become in the future, but what they are right now is an interesting creature with albums that have improved in steady increments one-over-the-other until their current self-titled third album form.
The shortest song here, for instance, is a cat’s hair over seven-and-a-half minutes. Fading Aeon alternate more closely between two preferred lengths, one that is well into eleven-minute territory and the other closer to eight and a half. That is how we land in a world of five songs and nearly fifty minutes of music – such has been Fading Aeon’s calling card since their first. As you might expect with an album like this, it will feel as if you have walked a journey of millions of steps alongside the band by the time its last song closes out.
Opener “The Tree Of Knowledge” barrels through a collection of folk-metal and melo-death staples for its first handful of minutes, settling on a steady mid-tempo groove to begin this self-titled album’s march forward. It seems at first as if Fading Aeon are just adopting a simple melodeath sway, but if you’re familiar with the band you’ll know that this three-piece can’t help but display a buffet of tempo and sometimes genre changes. They continue to write epics and whether a song succeeds is largely dependent on just how well they can hold your interest throughout.
So much of their self-titled third album seems to be building towards one specific moment though, as both “The Tree Of Knowledge” and the equally transient “Progressive Self-Destruction” lay groundwork for the following pairing of songs that the album seems to turn on. Those two being the lengthy wanderings of “The Awakening” and “Fall Into The Icarian Sea”.
For any other band, two songs clocking in at about eleven minutes each is enough to justify an EP. For Fading Aeon it’s just business as usual as they traverse across multiple mountain ranges of music for these two songs. While they do share some DNA – both songs tend to drift out of soft, cleaner passages before moving into larger bombast for their openings – they also differ in a few regards. “Fall Into The Icarian Sea” is more start and stop in its nature; when people speak of peaks and valleys in terms of tempo, “Fall Into The Icarian Sea” is one such song as it dives both up and down for its eleven and a half minute treatise on music.
The constant shifting of the quiet beneath the song and each time it swells up means it progresses in multiple movements. Prog-rock bands would often break songs up into chapters and have sub-sections within an overall piece and “Fall Into The Icarian Sea” follows a similar approach. It ties up that bow with a massive guitar solo closer to the end of the song.
“The Awakening” is a tad more straightforward, jogging through melodeath riffwork at a steady pace and letting some of that melancholy doom play around the edges. “The Awakening” taking place at the center of the album is not only an awakening within their story, but also an awakening of the ideas that Fading Aeon have been toying at with the first two songs. Here, within the near-eleven minutes of the center of the album, Fading Aeon play all of their cards and describe exactly how big this album is going to be. Which is why “Metamorphosis – The Endless Cycle” essentially cycling back around to the self-titled’s first song makes sense. Fading Aeon are bookending the album with the song, and even though they fade out consistently, similar guitar tones and melodic ideas that were peppered throughout “The Tree Of Knowledge” re-emerge here.
Fading Aeon continue on a journey of musical self-discovery for their self-titled album and that continued focus has paid dividends. Often the self-titled one is the album meant either to make a big statement as to what the band is or to serve as some sort of reinvention. Fading Aeon’s Fading Aeon falls into the former camp, as it becomes clear early on that they aren’t deviating too hard from the epic song-length formula that they had been working with before. Instead though, the band have gained more skill in ironing out a lot of the rougher seams when it comes to connecting their ideas together.
They’ve made five attention-demanding miniature journeys and called it a melodeath album, though the combination of the band’s influences has obviously stretched into the horizon much further than one subgenre label could hold. Fading Aeon’s new album is another impressive work from the band that brings them agonizingly close to realizing their full potential as one of the epic-length melodeath songwriting groups out there.
https://fadingaeon.bandcamp.com/album/fading-aeon
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