troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2022-09-06 08:33 am
troisoiseaux) wrote2022-09-06 08:33 am
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Ulysses Dies at Dawn - The Mechanisms
Having been recently introduced to the Mechanisms via High Noon Over Camelot, I listened to their cyberpunk noir Greek mythology retelling, Ulysses Dies at Dawn, which is just, A+! 10/10! I enjoyed this so much!! I liked the songs better (or at least more consistently) than in High Noon Over Camelot, and I loved how it played with the myths, especially its focus on "hero"/human/demigod characters - Odysseus/Ulysses, obviously, but also Oedipus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Ariadne (who in this story are, I kid you not, a heist team) - rather than the gods. More than once, I laughed out loud at how cleverly a myth had been referenced or reimagined.
There are some stories— or, sources of stories, I guess?— that I've loved in every iteration I've encountered since I was a child; you will be unsurprised to learn that Greek mythology is one of them. (Sherlock Holmes is another one.) Tumblr's mid-2010s "Greek mythology/Dante's Inferno/etc. was fanfiction!" phase was pretty cringe, but I think there's a nugget of truth in there about the appeal of, like, "touchstone" stories and characters, which can be - and have been - retold over and over, in different settings or situations or with different motivations ascribed to them. I think it lends itself especially well to a compact, genre-shuffling reimagining like this?? The individual songs, and narrative sections, color in the album's cyberpunk- and noir-flavored and story-specific details, but the characters' backstories are already broadly sketched out by, well, thousands of years of existing as stories, so it can really hit the ground running. (There is also some Official short fiction further exploring the world and characters— Orpheus seems to be a favorite of whoever wrote it.)
I feel like if you made a spectrum which somehow started at Repo! the Genetic Opera and ended with Ghost Quartet, this album would be in the middle? The overall vibes (and some of the songs) remind me more of the former, while the structure (and other songs) reminds me more of the later.
There are some stories— or, sources of stories, I guess?— that I've loved in every iteration I've encountered since I was a child; you will be unsurprised to learn that Greek mythology is one of them. (Sherlock Holmes is another one.) Tumblr's mid-2010s "Greek mythology/Dante's Inferno/etc. was fanfiction!" phase was pretty cringe, but I think there's a nugget of truth in there about the appeal of, like, "touchstone" stories and characters, which can be - and have been - retold over and over, in different settings or situations or with different motivations ascribed to them. I think it lends itself especially well to a compact, genre-shuffling reimagining like this?? The individual songs, and narrative sections, color in the album's cyberpunk- and noir-flavored and story-specific details, but the characters' backstories are already broadly sketched out by, well, thousands of years of existing as stories, so it can really hit the ground running. (There is also some Official short fiction further exploring the world and characters— Orpheus seems to be a favorite of whoever wrote it.)
I feel like if you made a spectrum which somehow started at Repo! the Genetic Opera and ended with Ghost Quartet, this album would be in the middle? The overall vibes (and some of the songs) remind me more of the former, while the structure (and other songs) reminds me more of the later.
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Anyway, I feel like for a certain type of kid, it's Greek, Norse, or Egyptian mythology. Like a starter pokémon! You choose your mythology from a big illustrated story collection at the library when you're 7 and then it's lifelong love from there.
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