It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with Fading Trail Count The Days.
Welcome back, Daylight Savings Time just struck so hopefully the extra hour of sleep helped. If you sleep like me, you sleep well about once a year. I know the darker weather tends to weigh down on many people, so please take care. Personally, though, I love it. And while we are on the subject of darker, colder spaces, let's travel to Helsinki, Finland.
Fading Trail is today’s grinders. Have not heard of them? Well, their discography is a little thin, with only two releases to their name: today’s album, and a 2019 EP. The band, according to an interview on Aversionline, is mainly comprised of two people (Markus M. and Tomi P.), but rotates friends in and out to play parts and live shows. Count The Days is the band’s debut LP released by Everyday Hate. And oh, how it grinds.
If you like it when the first thing that springs to mind is, “Holy shit, that sounds like Nasum!” go, buy this now. Fading Trail has a very similar style of grind. It is something that cuts straight to the bone with every buzzsaw guitar string plucked. Fading Trail play just as tight and aggressively. It is something that really gets the blood flowing. And speaking of blood flow, the album opens on “Deprivation” with a quote from, I believe, Jeffery Dahmer. And with a band name like Fading Trail, and the album title Count The Days, the feeling of a (cold) case file comes to mind.
The band is off to the races once the quote closes out and they fire forward with that classic buzzsaw fury. Over ten tracks Fading Trail unrelentingly rip and tear. This is the kind of grind that walks that line between death metal and grindcore without falling into the deathgrind category. Fading Trail do throw us, besides some ugly tracks, some surprises. The guitar solos on tracks like “Chasm” and “Black Walls” absolutely shred. And the opening of “They’ll Take Everything” is pure fire. The whole track is, but the opening…goddamn!
Fading Trail also mix it up a little bit with “Crawl”, which goes straight death metal/grind as is the formula, but halfway through throws in some noise and sound clips, ending with a snippet of a Bill Hicks sketch. The final track, “Count the Days”, is an instrumental that acts kind of as a noise rock, jam track and takes things out in an interesting way.
Two years between a single EP and a full-length can seem like a bit for a newer band, especially with little new material teased in between, but we have Count The Days now. This album fires on all cylinders all the way through. I will say it again, if you like your grind with that death metal-tinged Nasum feel, then this needs to be in your ears. Total death metal/grinding fury. Get grinding on this!
Fading Trail Bandcamp
