A Beautiful Odyssey - A JJ2 Post -

 It has been a hot minute since I've written a WMW (on a Wednesday?! what is this madness!), and I think I have just the song for the occasion of return!

 

The song: .... well it's in Greek which is kinda hard to type, so we'll do our best here 

The band is called Hoplites (typing this into spotify will bring it up, but the actual band name is in Greek)

And the song is "Mnviv aeloe, 0ea (pi?)apauaivouevn euov" (if this doesn't show up, its the first song of their album Napauaivouevn, or even easier, their most listened to song on spotify)

Ok, now that we are actually able to listen to the song, what do we get? 

10 minutes and 14 seconds of pure, beautiful insanity 

The first 50 seconds are a strangely danceable percussion + sung section, sounding primal or ancient (very very good vibes) and very Very difficult to not bop along to. At the 48 second mark we are hurled into the cataclysm of audio craziness that Hoplites is known for. Crazy speedy riffs, unrelenting drumming, a short saxophone solo that starts a mere 6 seconds into the post-intro part of the song. From the getup, this song is extremely dynamic, and really makes you feel like you're being flung around a hurricane of changing time signatures, drum patterns, and noise as different elements come and go with barely a measures notice. This basically is the song for at least the next 2 minutes until we reach some sort of solid footing to hold on to, followed by a slight break that features an aggressive reprise of the intro with a similar percussion and vocal section, this time accompanied by a deep bass and slightly quicker tempo. 

If you recall, I've talked about another song from this band quite a while ago, and their sound does not seem to differ between albums because just like the other one (and really all of their songs), this song is very dense. Hoplites' songs often require multiple listens to fully understand what they're doing in the song because the ridiculousness of everything happening at once is overwhelming. But, through those multiple listens you begin to piece out the true beauty of what they've put together, which is controlled chaos that somehow tells a story. 

As we near the end of the song, around the 8:30 mark, the song begins to simplify a little bit. Some of the riffs are harsh and dissonant, which is kind of a trademark for this band, and then BAM suddenly another short, crazy sax solo starting just before 9 minutes, dueted with a quieter guitar solo, equally as all over the place. After some more rambling the song ends with the sound of panting, which, given how the song sounds, is appropriate. 

As the Korean blogger 'chedragon' writing on the prog metal blog 'progutopia' says (translated) about another song on the album:

"It sounds like a chaotic mixture of strange noises and dissonances, but it is all bearable thanks to the ceaseless bombardment of easily digestible black metal riffs and blast beats. It is as if a whale swallowed a masscore band, a technical black metal group, and a ruthless prog ensemble, and this is the result."

Despite describing another song, I feel like this accurately describes almost all of Hoplites' music better than I could!

Hope you liked today's WMW! And if you ever find songs that sound like the first 50 seconds of this one, let me know immediately, I need more of this to dance around the firepit to.

https://blog.naver.com/chedragon/223437059131

progutopia : 네이버 블로그