The Aphrodite's Child - "666": Vangelis' masterpiece - a special and rare review

 The Greek band Aphrodite’s Child refers to the Christian Book of Revelations, particularly its violent apocalypse, on its 1972 album 666. This album possesses a fatalism completely at odds with the version of faith on What’s Going On? It does not attempt to deal with the detail of the biblical story but assembles a world based upon it, with key symbols (the four horse-men, ‘the Beast’ ‘the Lamb’, seven of everything, the final trump) acting as shorthand for the Christian apocalypse playing out the final days of earth. On a very general level, the album is an allegory of war and destruction, but there is little attempt to connect to the world of 1972. This refusal to break the unity of the constructed world might be seen as an aesthetic strength, but it also means that to consider the concept album as an allegory is a speculative enterprise. Were we to think deterministically, we might imagine that Aphrodite’s Child and its album 666 somehow reflected the turmoil in Greece at the time, but it is so deeply coded that the historical events are not even inscribed in lyrics or music. 

The double album veers from freak-outs to choral sections via narrative passages; moving through rock; stopping by funk; and then throwing this altogether in the near 20 minutes of ‘All the Seats Were Occupied’, which makes up the bulk of side four. ‘Loud Loud Loud’ establishes the telling of the story; the sole plaintive voice is pitched against a chorus, indicating the mass consequences of the apocalypse and the isolation of the individual in the face of the impending end. The key to the album is alternation between quieter, mournful sections and tracks and aggressive instrumental or vocal rock tracks. The progression of the apocalypse is marked, predictably enough, by increased cacophony towards the end of the third side, notably in the weird ‘∞’ composed mainly of female vocal shrieking, growling, panting, shouting, whispering and intoning ‘I am to come at once’ - the most effective part of the band’s narrative escalation, as orchestrated by Vangelis. ‘All the Seats Were Occupied’ meanders through rock and funk before breaking up at various points with reprises of sections of the previous three sides, which speed up and by the end collide. The wistful ballad ‘Break’ acts as a coda. Side four seems to be the aftermath of the end, with the chosen survivors in the occupied seats. Or perhaps the seats are within some other type of escape vessel, with the last people ‘left behind’? The very last lines, with seemingly no narrative link to the rest of the album, end on a high (even if it is a melancholic high), as ‘Fly/High/And then/You make it’ is intoned as the final words.

The scope of 666 is impressive, even if the lyrics and narration heavily date the album. Unlike Keith Emerson, Vangelis tried to replicate the scale of an orchestra, rather than signifying a similarity to classical music through endlessly varying instrumentation, including traditional instruments, keyboards, rock, orchestral and jazz instruments, bells, objects, and a diverse range of singing styles. Aphrodite’s Child also attempted to recreate the narrative drive of Wagnerian opera, mobilizing myths as formal structures. The same is true of concept albums based on the theme of music itself, such as Magma’s nine- album sequence telling the tale of aliens who come to rescue Earth through music in ways that link jazz, modern opera, rock and traditional European sounds (the aliens are responsible for the entirety of Earth music). Jon Anderson’s solo album Olias of Sunhillow never comes to Earth, but invents fantastic beings that travel the universe in search of music.