After about three years since his last album “Renaissance,” Apashe struck again, enveloping listeners in a barrage of virtuosic bass. The new album “Antagonist,” released Nov. 24, has been teased at by Apashe for nine months. Releasing teasers and full songs built up a massive amount of hype from me and other listeners, making us very excited and this album most certainly didn’t disappoint.
Apashe very consistently features other musicians in his music. Most of the time he hosts rap artists to pull together the music and make it more smooth. However, the unsung heroes of his music are the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra. In this album, all the backing tracks that require a physical instrument, while composed by Apashe, are performed by the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra. This orchestra is essential to the feel, as it makes the sound more authentic and acoustic, contrasting the boosted bass. There are also other performers that, while not part of the orchestra, they also don’t sing. In the song “Devil May Cry,” the pianist Sofiane Pamart pulls together the entire song by being a soloist in the piece. Pamart dances around the orchestra and the EDM, creating a rapturing, isolating sound. The piece revolves entirely around her playing, and she steps up to the challenge.
This isn’t to say the rapping or singing artists are any less relevant. In the song “Menace,” the featured artist Earthgang brings the song from decent to excellent. With their voices, they take a standard Apashe song and make it more intense and flamboyant. Apashe’s instrumental part is already intense, taking aspects from opera. I would have never thought the combination of rap and opera would work as well as it did, but the music blew me away with the counterpoint of the conflicting styles.
The classical style music combined with EDM is a recurring motif in Apashe’s music. By taking inspiration from classical composers like Bach and Mozart and coalescing it with modern techniques, Apashe creates a very unique sound. A song that leans heavily into this is “RIP,” which features Vladimir Cauchemar and takes huge inspiration from the classical piece “Pruitt Igoe” by Philip Glass. “RIP” captures and recreates the feeling of utter desolation and destruction evoked by “Pruitt Igoe.” Apashe does this by creating repetitive notes that don’t stop — they keep cascading over each other to keep the listener on the edge of being overwhelmed.
Music videos always are a big point of Apashe’s art. They are always over the top and their plots are very incoherent, with almost no ties to the actual song. There are multiple cases of this, but the one that takes the cake is “Human,” with Wasiu as a featured artist. The video starts with the two of them on stage performing music, but it quickly escalates into them heading into space, crash landing and finally going into battle against each other on horseback. There is no reason for that to be there other than for the fun of it.
The album is a solid choice to listen to if you want to hear something that is just fun. There isn’t much depth to the lyrics, but that isn’t a particularly bad thing. It fits the style and the goals of the artist.
“Antagonist”: ★★★★★
