Bellum is one of the freakiest final bosses in all of the Zelda series. We don’t know much about it, but its design alone raises a lot of questions. It has five tentacles with an eye pattern at the end of each, but its only real eye somehow rests within its mouth. That seems bizarre to me, but then again, I don’t know any phantoms in real life. It’s none of my business to know how its anatomy works, but Bellum’s threatening aura isn’t just due to its looks – it also has some extremely chaotic battle music.
The song opens with Bellum’s motif over a cluster of dissonant strings, becoming more and more hectic with every passing second. This intro vigorously increases its intensity by using dramatic chord changes and by gradually picking up the tempo. The rest of the song takes on an exotic 13/8 time signature, subdivided into 3 sets of 3 and 2 sets of 2.
It may be tough to count, but the bassline (played by piano and timpani) lays down a consistent groove that isn’t too hard to follow once you get a feel for it. The chords have calmed somewhat, staying steady on a (still rather dissonant) Cdim7. The melody outlines this strange chord by flailing around unpredictably, much like Bellum itself.
After the melody wraps up, the saxophones throw some syncopated stabs into the mix, accented tritones instilling a sense of panic. As if that wasn’t enough, the next section’s chord change is particularly drastic as the new Edim7 chord shares not a single note with the previous Cdim7. The track finally takes a moment to breathe at the 1:17 mark, where the piano plays a short melody and leaves the timpani to keep the pulse going by itself. Although much calmer than before, a faint choir slowly rises in the back to keep the intensity from completely fizzling out. The song finally loops, returning to the unstable diminished chord that Bellum calls home.
Phantom Hourglass doesn’t get a lot of credit these days, but its main antagonist is one of my favorites of the non-Ganons. It poses a massive threat to the world of the Ocean King with its ability to suck the life force out of anything, and it’s such an enigma that I just can’t stop looking at it. It’s not often that a game is bold enough to make a creature like Bellum its main villain and, in a way, that amplifies its terrifying nature. Its battle theme reflects this fear too, of course.
After all, what scares a musician more than diminished seventh chords in an odd numbered time signature?
