COUNTING HOURS: The Will (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

If you were wondering what Jarno Salomaa can be doing these days while Shape Of Despair has been sleeping indefinitely since 2015 and "Monotony Fields", "The Will", the first album of a new band called Counting Hours, provides you with the answer. For in 2015, the Finn founded this parallel project with other joyful mates. At the beginning from a simple duet imagined with the singer Ilpo Paasela (The Chant), the entity then turned into a real band. The ex-Colosseum Sameli Köykkä is behind the drums, Tomi Ullgren, already Salomaa's sidekick in Shape Of Despair, plays second guitar and Markus Forsström, who also takes part in The Chant, plays bass. Counting Hours is a story of friendship but also of family, that of these musicians who have melancholy in their blood. A question of climate and geography no doubt.

Always a bit lazy (unless it's perfectionism), Jarno still took his time to materialize on tape the fruit of this reunion. A demo in 2016, then nothing more, until this first long-term offering. Given its quality, we won't hold it against his progenitors to finally offer only five real unreleased tracks, the rest of the album being represented by an intro, almost three minutes long but still a bit useless, as well as three-quarters of the draft that preceded it, without 'Wintry Insight'.

In the register of things that annoy (a little), we could also reproach Counting Hours for never really leaving the very beaten path of the Gothic dark Doom that it certainly exploits with a mastery coupled with an innate sense of pale melody but without any kind of originality. Thus, this way of weaving heady guitar lines evokes Katatonia ('Atonement' and its bite like an escaped ghost from 'Brave Murder Day'), some vocals remind us of Moonspell's work ('Saviour') or even Steven Wilson's, though in a rather distant way ('To Exit All False').

In the end, it is perhaps Rapture that we think of most, which is not surprising since Salomaa was the mastermind, but a Rapture that is less funereal, smoother although just as cold. The fact remains that this opus immediately seduces the listener in search of a soundtrack to face the long winter nights. Small jewels of writing and atmosphere, 'Profound', 'Buried In The White' and its bony notes without forgetting the already mentioned 'Atonement' or 'Saviour', are really irresistible, chapels frozen by the cold but warmed by a thin ray of light.

No doubt, considering the musicians present, we were expecting more, but we have to admit that Counting Hours is an efficient and very well done first draft, a kind of Scandinavian dark doom lesson, which only lacks a little more personality to rise above the melee. "The Will" coming five years after the band was formed, let's hope that the band is now more fertile and that it shares with its elder Shape Of Despair the greatness and not the regrettable apathy... - Official website

COUNTING HOURS

THE WILL

AUTRE LABEL

DOOM