FADING AEON: “THE VOICES WITHIN”

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Feb 152022
 

 

(This is DGR‘s review of the new second album by the German melodic death metal band Fading Aeon, which was released last December.)

Many, many, many moons ago in a long forgotten time I reviewed the debut release by German prog-melodeath act Fading Aeon. The group’s first release was a solid hybrid of the mass of genres that melodeath has become over the years, including pulling in influences from folk metal bands to the more long-form and journey-minded groups like Be’Lakor.

Debut releases hold a lot of potential and Fading Aeon’s A Warrior’s Tale was one style of ‘promising’ release, with much of it feeling like it was the group laying a foundation for things to come. While they had already solidified in a sound for that release, it still hinted that the group had more ideas toying with them than what had initially been put down. Where the group would head in their followup was an interesting prospect at the very least, so while it may have landed in a quieter time of the year in the opening weeks of December 2021, Fading Aeon saw fit to act upon that with their sophomore album The Voices Within. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ROUND-UP (PART 4B): FADING AEON — “A WARRIOR’S TALE”

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Oct 082019
 

 

(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 »