Hoplites - Παραμαινομένη (2024)^{Release ID: 49567}

I finally got through the previous albums of the Hoplites catalog, all so I can get to the one black metal album of 2024 that RYM seems to absolutely love.  I've been watching the 2024 charts for a while but haven't gotten around to this album yet.  I was focusing on other genres for a while and needed some more albums of different genres in my top 1000 albums.  See, the reason for that is because I was afraid of having too much metal there, and that this album might make it considering how much everyone loves it.  Since I have room for it now, I'm gonna give it a shot.

Instead of the three-to-seven minute energetic busts that we got on the last three albums, Hoplites surprises us with an evershifting avant-garde mess that's not only the most extreme album he's done so far, but is one of his most shifting and intriguing, going from one place to another at rapid pace without breaking the flow.  This is perfect for him since previous efforts have been very repetitive.  Our opening track has some saxophone at the beginning and end providing an extra backdrop for the insanity, for example.  No matter what's going on, the album is constantly going for over-composed insanity on epic scales.

Unfortunately, even though the songs do a lot, the emotional tone and end result of each song is ONCE AGAIN exactly the same.  You'd think with Hoplites' love of molding genres he'd have grown past that by now.  A five-star artist should be able to do multiple kinds of emotional cores if he's going to work with multiple sounds.  It's like the guy only really likes one type of song.  There's a lot of imagination in this album and that ONE THING gets in the way.  Sure, there are a couple of jazzy moments, and we can pretty much say that track 5 is a metalcore song, which is a little different, so there's that.

So despite that one flaw still being present, it's safe to say that Hoplites has made another improvement, and is now steering into Frank Zappa levels of experimental absurdity with overpowering effect.  This is music for those who love extreme music and for those who love extremities in general.  It's no wonder this is one of the highest rated metal albums of 2023.  This is imagination that almost breaks new ground for metal. 

Avant-garde music is not a style that I actively seek out. I want to like it, but more often than not I find myself trapped in a endless display of loud noises for their own sake. I have experimented in the past and there are of course exceptions, but music written for its own sake it not really something that resonates well with me.

I discovered Hoplites [Ὁπλίτης] due to a featured release recommendation last year and found myself very perplexed by the outcome. Trothisomeni (Τρωθησομένη) is an album that combined elements of black metal, death metal, technical thrash and brutal metalcore/mathcore. It came together in a full formed mess that somehow still had foundations that could have made it work if the songwriting was not so herky-jerky in its execution. Well, much like with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Ὁπλίτης work at an uncomfortably fast pace. Τρωθησομένη was the first of three albums this solo act released last year and 2024 has another release not even two (2) full weeks into the year.

And yet, Paramainomeni (Παραμαινομένη) is somehow the best version of Ὁπλίτης that I've heard. This time Ὁπλίτης are only presenting six (6) new tracks to engage with, but this time we can see some huge girth. The longest record in the discography so far contains three (3) tracks that exceed ten minutes in length. While the remainder hover between six-and-a-half and nine minutes. And I could tell before listening that my bias towards avant-garde music and Ὁπλίτης as a whole was peaking out. But as I listened to Παραμαινομένη I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. With these extended runtimes, the songs on this album have a bit more of a minimalistic flare to them, so individual ideas are given time to marinate and resonate with the listener, presenting a strange sense of familiarity and comfort. This is until the next drastic change of style takes place and the cycle repeats itself. But the reason they work so much better here than anywhere else has to do with the connectivity of these phrases together to form a whole.

It is not perfect mind you; the metalcore/mathcore influence that persists throughout the albums runtime is quite insufferable given the thick chunk of the bass drum and guitar chugging. It becomes extremely unsettling when they take on djent inspiration on "Ἡ τῶν λυσσημάτων ἄγγελος". And, as I previously mentioned, the production can be quite lousy at times. The compositions may be solid, but the guitar timbre is mechanical and overstated. The dissonance of the scraping and saxophone solos feels like a executive choice to alienate this style of music from the general public, and my estimation is that it will work.

Which is a shame because when it comes to how I wish more avant-garde acts would create harmonic dissonance, Παραμαινομένη is the way I would have imagined it. It might be a longer album than most familiar with Ὁπλίτης will be comfortable with, but it shows that they have what it takes to make gripping music, regardless of style. 

Best Songs: Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεὰ παραμαινομένη ἐμοῦ..., Παραδειγματιζομένη μουσική, Συμμιαινόμεναι Διονύσῳ Ἐλευθέριῳ