Photo by Giovanni Mori
Giovanni Mori | Posted January 26th, 2025
Welcome to part two of my interview with Constellation X, and track by track review of their first full length album, Quasar. After the album’s release on January 3rd, I had a chance to sit with three out of the band’s four members: guitarists and vocalists Mark Delbianco and Ash Haughey, and drummer Josiah Hudok, to talk about the music, and their process in working together as a progressive metal band with a large variety of influences.
With over thirty more minutes of music left to cover, we finished Quasar’s somber sixth track, as well as the last of the three character songs in the album’s narrative, “Am I Coming Home?” Once again, if you haven’t already, I recommend listening to the album in full before reading for a better listening experience, and be sure to check out part one of my track review and interview with the band!
track 7: quasar I: light
Youtube: Constellation X – Topic
“Quasar I: Light” kicks off with Pete Rauch’s bassline sounding like it was pulled straight from a Halo soundtrack before the rest of the band explodes into a post grunge sound, reminiscent of bands like Breaking Benjamin or Seether. However, the band still sticks to their progressive metal roots, showing technical ability across all instruments more inspired by Dream Theater and Periphery.
Hudok: “I think for the whole band it’s the toughest one to perform, there’s just a lot of intricate stuff going on…this was one of the songs that I thought was really challenging to write drums for, because a lot of the riffs are like really crazy, and if you’re just sort of listening to the isolated guitar it doesn’t make a lot of sense, it’s really weird.”
When listening past the intricate vocal melodies, you can hear the instrumentation working its hardest on this track. This becomes more obvious in the bridge section as we’re juggling between odd time signatures and a rollercoaster of guitar riffs, and then finally finishing it off with an aggressive djent breakdown.
In the lyrics, we progress further into the story as our characters finally accomplish their goal of finding the Quasar and its nearby planet. “Quasar I: Light” is the album’s most optimistic sounding song, with still that little bit of dread that we also felt throughout the rest of the album, and is more apparent in this song when listening to the bridge section’s vocals.
Haughey: “We have found the star and the planet that we were looking for, this is actually a song of great joy, but still that little bit of uncertainty lying beneath the surface, and you can see that at the end of the middle section where it’s just clean guitar and Pete singing ‘Drift away deep in space, study at my own pace’ is like him [The Scientist] appreciating the fact that we found what we were looking for, but then me and him join together and say ‘Was it worth it? Could we still be in peril? Home is waiting for us, I feel like this could be the end’ is being like ‘Oh no, I think something is going to go wrong here.’”
track 8: quasar II: shadows
Youtube: Constellation X – Topic
We now approach the mother of all songs from the album, “Quasar II: Shadows,” which listeners will soon realize clocks in at a mighty nineteen minutes long! When asked initially about the song, Haughey said:
“It’s ridiculous, absolutely one hundred percent, but honest to God, other than “Under Control,” this has been the most popular song on the record, people seem to really like this one…this song does a lot for the narrative and it really is probably the most emotional song on the album.
“Originally, this song was forty minutes, this was before Josiah joined the band as well, and I think we came back to it like a year later after not touching it for a while and kind of being inactive because we didn’t have a drummer, and we were like ‘We need to fix this…we need to find what is actually good out of this and what works as like a flow and we need to stick with that.’”
It’s very easy to get lost and overwhelmed in a song like this, but I’ve found the best way to digest and explore this track is to divide it into mini tracks and explore each one, let’s dive in!
track 8a: Intro/the medic section (0:00 – 5:02)
The song’s intro section is definitely the easiest to unpack as we start with quiet cymbal and tom hits. We are then presented with very gloomy guitar parts that give you a sinking feeling before the mood quickly picks up, and you’re suddenly blasted with bigger chords and faster drumming.
After this adrenaline rush, we’re given another quiet and somber section, this time with more of a System of a Down-esque groove and momentum on the bass and drums, the vocals then begin with very bleak lyrics and a thin melody sung by DelBianco.
Haughey: “The opening line of the lyrics of this song, which Mark wrote actually and I love it, is ‘My hands start to freeze, cold and dead it’s getting bleak,’ it’s such a brutal line to open the song with. Over that, that kind of repeated guitar section that’s in such a weird time signature, that hits pretty hard.”
Suddenly, we’re pulled from clean guitars and vocals to feral screams, deafening guitars, and blast beats on the drums as Haughey and DelBianco roar “FIRE IGNITES BEFORE MY EYES, CLOTH AND SKIN FADE AWAY” (4:00 – 4:08). What listeners may figure out by this point, according to Haughey:
“They plotted their trajectory wrong and ended up flying too close to the actual star itself, and it literally melted the windows of the ship they were on…we were supposed to land on a nearby planet and ended up missing the orbit and getting sucked into the orbit of the star…and now all of the characters are suffering from the consequences of that. And The Medic knowing the least about what’s going on, has the most visceral reaction to this.”
Photo by Giovanni Mori
track 8b: the scientist section (5:02 – 9:28)
Shifting away from one of the heaviest parts on the album, we’re now back to clean guitars once again, this time to another more calculated style of arpeggiated picking similar to what we heard in “Under Control.” The lyrics on top of this instrumental takes us now to The Scientist’s perspective, and opens with a poetic monologue before a quick and bouncy verse melody written by Rauch, Haughey said:
“One of the hardest lines I think I’ve ever heard in any song ever, Pete wrote this entire thing by himself, ‘An honest death is not a blessing, it’s not a curse, it’s just a death, as sad as it was preventable and as lonely as it is freeing.’
“The regret starts coursing through him for being overconfident, ‘Work as fast as I can but there is no way to fix this in time so all I can do is pray to a god I don’t believe in’ is one of the other lines from when he starts singing. Again, you still hear the cold and calculatedness, and the scientific approach to everything, but it’s like there’s a certain amount of regret there for his overconfidence.”
The song then breaks into a louder post rock style section in another odd time signature, but what really shines the most here is the falsetto sung by Rauch, easily being his most impressive vocal performance on the album. I had another chance after the interview to ask Rauch about his character in this tragic moment:
“The frantic nature of the really fast part, and despondency of the second high part in that section are sort of just supposed to be in contrast with the anxiety that came with boredom in ‘Under Control’…I wanted to show that character is like always anxious, checking up on details, very detail oriented, and has a lot of anxiety. Whenever everything is going fine, he’s like that. And when everything is going to s***, he’s still like that.”
track 8c: The Captain Section (9:28 – 13:58)
We’re suddenly interrupted by sirens, which was actually made using various guitar effects by DelBianco. We cut to another modern metal sound similar to “Mapping Stars” and “Quasar I: Light” with more bleak lyrics sung by Haughey as we enter The Captain’s perspective.
Haughey: The opening lyrics ‘I sit back and watch it burn, I know they won’t return’ which is kind of a callback to ‘Am I Coming Home?’ ‘Time slows down until I die, the screams from their throats mixed with mine,’ so he feels this huge amount of responsibility for causing this, and it feels like it’s his fault transitioning into the next part where he opens with ‘Now I know I won’t see home again.’
Classic metal fans may appreciate this section’s instrumentals that sound more inspired by bands like Iron Maiden or Dragonforce as we get a mix of harmony guitars, more blast beats, and a skillful guitar solo by Haughey. The section closes with another more defeated sounding monologue under a lo-fi guitar part.
Haughey: “But the monologue really touches on you know…he just doesn’t believe in anything anymore, he’s just a completely broken man at this point, and that’s how he is in his death. He has lost his family, he has lost his world, he has failed in the only thing that he could’ve done to stop all of it.”
Photo by Giovanni Mori
track 8d: outro/eulogy section (13:58 – 19:48)
Our last section of the nearly twenty minute track opens with an emo inspired guitar before another explosion of Haughey singing “Save us,” with increasing layers of vocal harmony and drumming, all while in the background, we hear Rauch chanting “Dead and gone and dead and gone and…” (14:34 – 16:48), calling back to the bridge section of “Voyagers.”
Under a shoegaze instrumental, the band once again builds this final section up with beautiful layers of melody from each vocalist. You hear Haughey’s lines, “Still I wait, left it up to fate, still I see, no air left to breathe,” followed by Rauch, “Now we’re dead and gone, useless endeavor,” and finally DelBianco, “Some people they like to find, keep searching for me ’til the end of time, somebody will hear me sing, keep searching for me as I die for nothing” (16:50 – 19:37). The song has a depressing, yet constructive conclusion as the guitar circles its way back to the gloomy part from the intro section.
It’s safe to say by the time we reach the song’s final seconds that “Quasar II: Shadows” quite literally has the most a band can offer in a song, combining many different genres, techniques, and emotions into one perfect storm.
track 9: The words of daedalus
Youtube: Constellation X – Topic
After the album’s magnum opus, when it feels like the band has thrown everything they possibly could at the listener, we approach Quasar’s ninth and final track, “The Words of Daedalus,” which thematically, references the Greek mythos of Icarus flying too close to the sun. Rauch is credited as the primary songwriter for this track both instrumentally and lyrically.
Rauch: “It was not one of the very first batch of songs we wrote, but it was one of the very early ones on the record…there’s kind of a lot of chords in that song for a pop song, which I think is one of the things that is a calling card of mine…I just wanted it to be a very reflective piece.
“The events of the story are over at Quasar II, Daedalus is a way to seal in sort of the hubris element of the story where the characters are convinced that they can make this achievement. Their job is to go to this star, and it’s a reflective piece to say ‘This was never possible, this was always a last ditch attempt…in some ways, the mission had to be done, but in other ways, it was always kind of a waste.’”
The tragic epilogue to Quasar is very simple musically, with intermediate level chord progressions and common “verse chorus” song structure, similar to what we heard in “Am I Coming Home?” and was an absolutely necessary next step after the mighty and technical Quasar II. The album closes with a haunting but pleasant sounding three part harmony of the final chorus, and leaves the listener in a daze with an ominous synthesizer calling back to “Anxious” in its final seconds.
final thoughts
Although I’ve never been a big listener of progressive rock or metal music, I overall felt Quasar was a very decent and enjoyable album, especially for fans of heavy and atmospheric music. To recap from part one of my interview and track review, and also from an outsider’s perspective, I felt the band had successfully reached their goal in creating the music and story they wanted while using Haughey’s definition of “Diet Prog.” As technical and talented as they are, Constellation X effectively were not too self indulgent, which I find is very easy to do in progressive music.
It became even more enjoyable seeing the band play the full album at their release show at Bottlerocket Social Hall, and additionally debuting two new songs during the band’s encore as part of their second album currently in the works. When comparing it to Quasar from a songwriting perspective, DelBianco said:
“Quasar is I’d say sonically pretty consistent, you know? In that of tone, that of mood…the guitars are all in the same tuning, so like key wise it’s similar too…we want to throw that out the window. We want to explore different areas, get more varied, have more flavor in our sound. The stuff we did play at the show is probably some of the most Quasar sounding stuff because they’re just heavy…but not in the way like Mapping and Sudden are. It sounds like the same band, but you can tell something’s different, but there are songs where it’s like ‘What?! This is the same band???’”
The Pittsburgh band shows no signs of slowing down, so be sure to listen to Quasar, available now on all streaming platforms, and follow the band’s Instagram, @cxband_pittsburgh, for more updates!
Sources
“Quasar I: Light” Youtube, uploaded by Constellation X – Topic, 2 Jan. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoedqBsSb1A
“Quasar II: Shadows” Youtube, uploaded by Constellation X – Topic, 2 Jan. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GusOg1pTj4
“The Words of Daedalus” Youtube, uploaded by Constellation X – Topic, 2 Jan. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MplIigHJQaM
