Track By Tracks: Maestus - Deliquesce (2018)

1. Deliquesce:

The title track most accurately represents the purpose of the band. This is an album about wasting away, about the decay of the self, such as it is. This song is about being lost in the throes of disappointment, buffeted by the arid winds of epiphany. It is about the pain of understanding, and the track’s steady speed lends the necessary effect to a sense of giving yourself over to something, as if you were coming face to face with some new, undeniable force. Often, such forces are merely misery given bright countenance and compelling velvets, cloaked in something that vaguely nauseates you. Like vapor condensing to liquid, all matter is sewage running down the world’s back.

“Ineffable hope

Lingers between the rifts

Hidden, reticent

Embracing isolation,

Woe, and mourning”

2. Black Oake:

A lurching, punctuated rhythm provides the foundation for a bed of lush dissonance in a song that’s part doom, part black metal, and part Badalamenti-riffing ambiance. Having as much to do with mourning as it does with loss, “Black Oake” was chosen as the second song on the record because in a way, it signifies an ever-failing second wind. Exhaustion, frustration, despondency, and all their attendant symptoms, are given full vent here. The image of a black tree is meant only as a kind of shifting referent: it is not mentioned in the lyrics, existing only as a blurry shape in our minds, gnarled and barren as it must have been. Almost like a natural headstone.

“Enslaved

To this wretched flesh

Longing

Is my inheritance”

3. The Impotence of Hope:

The motif at work in “The Impotence of Hope” feels like the expression of a typical human response to sustained anxiety. Dueling tensions between keys and the interplay of melody and disharmony underpin a sense of those truths you wish you could bury. Looming fitfully in the mind, a life hovers, pulled by implements of pain over a long and brutal concourse. This song is a reminder that for every hope there is a corresponding bristle, that the day’s lurid mood may be tempered only by isolation, itself like a draft of thick, clotted wine.

“Through tired, dead eyes

I watch the sunrise

This orb: a cosmic failure

Our hope: an eternal lie”

4. Knell of Solemnity:

At once the most subdued and the most bombastic of Deliquesce’s four tracks, “Knell of Solemnity” concerns the fear inherent to eras of self-discrimination. There is a seasickness to love of any kind, and the waves of debris upon which you move cannot forget all that damage. This, our dirge, offers a bleak prognosis: when we are bequeathed life’s shallow breath, we are destined to be broken by the departures which infuse it. A cavernous beat persists at the track’s absolute center, bolstered by churning strings and distant choral epitaphs. As it nears conclusion, the spirit of the song sloughs away in decaying chords, detuning keys, and shredded, contorted vocal arrangements.

“Obscured

Through iceglass

Redeemed

In the orb’s core”