Tethrippon — Self Titled

Tethrippon are two chaps from Northern Hellas in Greece that have chosen to name themselves after the four-horse chariot race from the ancient Olympic Games. Their romantic aim combines a “respect to their history, their tradition and the heroic achievements of their predecessors…” with “the ancient Hellenic philosophy, poetry and culture”.

To achieve this, Tethrippon’s sound, maintained throughout all ten tracks of their self-titled album, has one leg in the martial end of the neofolk pool, while the other splashes around in the shallower waters of cinematic classical music. The tools used in this confluence are mainly synthesised horn and string pre-sets sequenced precisely and cleanly together with digital percussion that can lend a surprisingly camp, europop undercurrent to an otherwise testosterone-fuelled celebration of ancient traditions. All the while layered male vocals sincerely intone what sounds like warriors’ drinking songs of old (but it’s unclear what the songs are about as they are all “sung in intellectual-Greek”, whatever that is).

With this specific anachronistic soup of styles and instrumentation it’s hard not to be reminded of Laibach, particularly their more recent synthesised orchestrations. But whereas Laibach’s transposition of pop as militaristic anthems (or vice versa) has the power to both charm and thrill while uniquely framing historical and contemporary issues, Tethrippon’s feels duplicative without breadth or substance and as a result tepid. Tracks like ‘Mother Nature’s Hymn’, ‘A Prayer to the Sun’ and ‘Internal Rising’ feel interchangeable, all using very similar war marches and timbres to describe predictably their peaks and troughs. In fact, these days we’re primed to recognise this music as both ‘epic’ and ‘war-mongering’ through Hollywood’s extensive use of Wagner-lite classical with rock production as bombastic hyperbole, especially on trailers to ‘epic’ films such as Gladiator or 300 (and it’s subsequent use to sell expensive cars to male audiences). Curiously, the professional, crisp mix of synthesised instrumentation reduces any militaristic force – live instrumentation playing the same thing, even if it suffered in recording quality, would possibly be a different matter.

However, when the rhythm is varied and different timbres creep in, the experience can become a bit more affecting. ‘Dominant of the senses’ kicks off with female vocals and incorporates more eastern sounds providing a brief rest from the world of warcraft, while right in the middle of the album, ‘The Brave’ features what is close to a hip-hop rhythm, making one wonder what a martial/hip-hop fusion might yield through combining the machismo so strongly inherent in both styles.