Saturday 8 October 2016

Four Horsemen (Aphrodite's Child, 1972)

A stunning track, this one is! It is taken from the album "666", a concept about the Book of Revelation released in 1972, when the band had actually already disbanded. Its structure is based on the strong contrast between quiet and loud passages and culminates with the final guitar solo (a very good one, IMHO), backed with Demis Roussos's fa-fa-fa vocal harmonies. As usual with this band, the song includes many diffferent - and even disparate - musical elements, but they all fit very well into a clever pattern.


The Four Horsemen as depicted by Viktor Vasnetsov in 1887.


This mix-matching skills probably are the best reason why Aphrodite's Child are so dear to the progfans worldwide. In addition to this, "Four Horsemen" displays a well found melody and a smart although close lyrical adaptation of the sixth chapter of its Biblical reference book. Useless to say, the Revelation will inspire other prog musicians, but this song and this album have a genuine flavour I still like.

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