Counting Hours are back! Not that the Finns were ever missing, but the glacial pace at which the Vantaa-based quintet — featuring members of Shape of Despair/ex-Rapture, Impaled Nazarene, and ex-Colosseum — move, they might as well be always gone. Debut album, The Will, appeared out of nowhere in 2020 on Spanish indie The Vinyl Division. OK, not out of thin air, but the dormant periods between releases is torturous. The heavy heart of The Will naturally leads into the weighted mind of The Wishing Tomb, a title which sheds light into the ever-looming dark in which Counting Hours reside.
Fans of Rapture, Atoma, Ghost Brigade, and other mopesters take heed, of course. This is prime rainy day walk material, the kind we need more of. Actually, there’s a bit of My Dying Bride’s Like Gods of the Sun here, too. So, yeah, “Away I Flow” is a double-triple heap of heaving sorrow, wreathed in Finnish optimism.
Says doomlord Jarno Salomaa: “The music video for ‘Away I Flow’ was directed and shot by Ossi Lehtonen, who’s also responsible for the band’s earlier music video ‘To Exit All False.’ Shot in an underground cellar next to the band’s rehearsal room, this video returns to the origins from where the band got started. Aesthetically monotonous, the video brings forth a deeper dimension for the aural composition. Thematically, ‘Away I Flow’ describes those moments in your life when you ‘are driven’ to concentrate more on matters you are really into. Especially when these things which are driving are more negative ones. Be it whatever that is connecting you and the negative aspect as one, to form a flow of consciousness. ‘Away I Flow’ is also an outcome of these moments and the song itself came together quite quickly. After the initial idea the composition was developed with the whole band and when the producer Jussi Hämäläinen was brought in, the last pieces of the puzzle found their place. Away I flow. No desire to live.”
The Finns are happy people. Join them in their collective existential dread and perpetual suffering with “Away I Flow.”
Check out other links related to Counting Hours
** The Abbey — Influential Tracks
** Shape of Despair — Stream “Monotony Fields” HERE
