Maestus

Maestus

Deliquesce

code666

8 February 2019

This band must have pondered for a long time the question: What do you have to do if your objective is making your music sound, above all, beautiful? You already know how to be heavy. You already know to how growl like lion and you already know how to do raspy vocals. If you wanted to, you know to how do sick black metal. You already know to do death doom. You figured out how to sound somber. You know all this. Heavy. Slow. Growling. Fast parts. All those bases are covered. Now how do you go about making it beautiful? Or at least, beautiful to fans of metal and doom, given that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

This is how they solved the riddle that they put before themselves. The guitars stay away from abrasive, loud obnoxious pounding groove or power chord rhythms, and focus on developing slow or midtempo melodies that make possible a quick understanding of what one is hearing. It is pleasant, mellow, soothing sounds, not overpowering loudness. The music doesn’t ask you to be quick or be dead, it asks you to settle down and enjoy the melodies. It doesn’t demand that you love it or leave it, it is patient with you, and gives the room and time to figure out the epic heaviness at hand.

Growling in metal in general is harsh on the ears, though it may sound good to the people who are already fans of it. Screaming has the same problem. This album does have a bit of black metal raspy vocals, but the band is keenly aware that they have to be careful with it. Therefore, they couple it with the lower growling to soften the harshness in order to steer it towards elegance in doom. The main vocal style is the low growling that is present as a vibe, a mood, a gentle monster, if you will, not as a shock to the ear. With such an album, and given that the band is already big time on this road, they would benefit from allowing themselves even more freedom by letting the melodies stand out even more. The keyboards work well with the album and it would be great to go at it and use them on a more upfront or at least on a more constant basis throughout the songs. This album is recommended highly to devoted fans of death doom, especially fans of the melodic-melancholic elegant-sublime kind of death doom.

maestus.bandcamp.com/album/deliquesce