Album review : MAESTRICK – Espresso Della Vita : Lunare

Frontiers Music [Release date : 02/05/25]

The progressive metal terrain is well mapped. Few destinations remain undiscovered.
Yet, Brazilian band, Maestrick, staked their own claim, blending surrealism with artistry on their well received debut album, Unpuzzle, in 2011.

And now, day turns to night on Espresso Della Vita : Lunare, the follow up to their second album, EDV : Solare (2019), and the next stage of the band’s (train) journey through life.
It’s a well used metaphor, but it’s a cool foundational narrative for a powerful, big hitting Progressive Metal album.

The band works hard to craft sensory overload and atmospherics, making particularly good use of soundscape and transitions, pulling us one way, then the other, hitting us unexpectedly with movie like jump cuts.

This works really well on ‘Boo!’ and ‘Upside Down’, conveying moods and meanings, on what seem like deranged Disney musicals’ soundtracks, full of seesawing melodies, changes of pace and adrenaline bursts of heavily soundscaped prog overtones.

The album highpoint comes early, the fabulous ‘Ghost Casino’, like a Broadway show tune, full of verve, full of bite, with a huge knowing smile on its face.
The thought of tracks like this being a soundtrack to a Rocky Horror, Prog Metal stage musical is hard to escape.

The wonderful ‘Mad Witches’ is a “Beauty and The Beast” styled duet, with massed, stage musical backing vocals. Highly dramatic moments, beautifully orchestrated, fight for the same space with humorous exchanges and rushing passages. There’s always a sense of managed chaos. So much so that you could put the narrative to one side and enjoy the album as a purely immersive experience,

They craft more unique musical stories with ‘The Root’ and ‘Sunflower Eyes’.

The first binds strings, the classics, monstrous time changes and minor key bgv harmonies, to a labyrinthine arrangement.

The second, sketched around a cool piano motif, is the album’s obligatory ballad. It’s an evocative love song with grown up sentiments and an understated arrangement. It could make it in the straight world.

As claimed by Fabio Caldeira, the band’s vocalist:

“This is our most ambitious, grandiose work… we are storytellers, musical illustrators of scenes, landscapes and feelings.”

They are all of that, and more. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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