Maesion is an up-and-coming, five-piece post-hardcore band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their debut full length, They Are the Vultures, gives you a good idea of what kind of potential they possess. The album opens up with The Vultures Are Coming. This track is just an intro in which you hear vultures crowing, and near the latter part, instruments will start to fade in. Vaderbomb is next and picks up the pace as soon as it kicks in. The first thing I noticed with this band is that the screams are different, but in a good way. The clean vocals in Vaderbomb are also somewhat unique because they’re not extremely high-pitched like many post-hardcore bands clean vocals are, but that’s not to say they’re authentic. The third track, The Lion’s Den, features a very catchy chorus and some awesome guitar riffs. Next up is Hell Cat. This is definitely one of the best songs on the album. The chorus is very catchy, even more so than in The Lion’s Den, and the guitar leads and riffs are even better too! Hell Cat finished off with a good breakdown, which kind of leads into the next song Martial Law. The re-occurring theme of catchy choruses is heard again on the fifth track, Martial Law. However, aside from the chorus, nothing really stands out in this song. After Martial Law, comes the title track, The Vultures Are Here. This is an instrumental track, but don’t let that turn you off. It fits with the rest of the album pretty well and it doesn’t seem like it was just thrown in as filler. The instrumental also has a nice little solo in it. The seventh track, Big Eye’s Demise, is another one of my favourite songs on the album. The guitar leads are just perfect throughout the song, and the breakdowns are pretty heavy. Big Eye’s Demise ends with a symphonic outro that leads into the next track, Wolf Tactics. Wolf Tactics starts off pretty heavy, but it starts to lose its aggressiveness when the chorus comes in. This is one of the cleaner songs on They Are the Vultures because most of the song is dominated with clean vocals and choruses. However, the next track, Rough Divide, is the opposite of Wolf Tactics. This is one of the heaviest songs on the album and it has a few really good breakdowns. After Rough Divide is The Cut. No, I am not saying the remaining songs on the album are lame and deserve to be ignored, that’s the name of the song! The Cut is another solid song, but it’s probably near the middle of the pack in terms of what is best on the album. The final track on They Are The Vultures is an acoustic version of the fourth track, Hell Cat. I think this is a great way to end the album and if I had to choose one song to be my favourite, this would definitely be my choice. Every time I hear the chorus of “I’m not mentally stable. I’m not physically able to go home, but I’ll push right through these thoughts of you and call this ‘home’,” I just want to sing along at the top of my lungs. I don’t know where this band came from, but I am very glad that I decided to give this album a listen. This is a great debut album, and it’s not your typical post-hardcore sound and because of that, I think I love this even more than I actually should.
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