Hoplites - Ψευδομένη (2023)^{Release ID: 41908}

Two years after the release of an underwhelming extended play, Liu Zhenyang as Hoplites produces the first studio album under that name, and shows a dramatic improvement that pretty much cements him as an inventive and worthwhile black death artist.  In the short 37 minutes are a bunch of interesting compositions that fit a perfect balance between black and death, and making some room for experimentation with the tempos and structures, oftentimes being quite intriguing.  The one thing about the album that's mastered is the atmosphere.  There's an excellent level of brutality and aggression that any aspiring extreme metal artist needs to get right, proving that Zhenyang was fully aware of the mistakes of the EP.  It's exceptionally noisy and crystal clear at the same time.  My problem with the album is that despite all it's trying to achieve, all of the songs pretty much have the same tone of guitars and emotional core, meaning that the songs aren't as varied as the diversified genre-tagging would have you believe.  Otherwise, this is a fun 38 minutes and it makes me eager to see how much more Hoplites will improve.

Despite all the initial outward impressions of Hoplites promising Hellenic Black Metal, the project is actually from Ningbo in Zhejiang province, China and so has caught me on the back foot from the off. This is an album of full-blooded, blasting, dissonant black metal with a heavy death metal influence. Liu Zhenyang chucks everything at it, presenting a bit of a wall-of-sound with a drum machine that, even though it's a machine, sounds like it's about to have an aneurysm, so much blasting is it asked to do. Of course, I'm not keen on such obvious use of drum machines, so that is a minus point I'm afraid. The whole album feels constipated and restricted, despite the dissonant elements being to the fore and he doesn't allow the tracks any time to breathe, so the listener is just battered relentlessly with no time to take stock of things, which I think is something you need to be able to do with a technical/dissonant album of metal like this otherwise it just feels like a beating.