By Abigail Olear
On a late Sunday afternoon, the faint plucking of a bass, the steady beat of drums and the breezy strumming of a guitar spill from the basement window of a small house in College Park.
The Odyssey — a band made up of three University of Maryland students and one alum — plays an eclectic mix of sounds that not even they can categorize.
“At this point, we couldn’t define it,” guitarist and lead vocalist Bobby Fellman said, as bassist James Schmidtlein chimed in with, “Just call it American music! There’s blues, there’s pop stuff from like the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘50s and there’s folk in there as well. It’s just American.”
Drummer Michael Belluscio and lead guitarist Ali Abdelmaksoud complete the group, whose songs tend to each have their own individual themes that they use to tell stories, which the band views as a fun way to write music.
“It’s also a really good way to bring out our personality, it’s like, ‘what do we think this would sound like?” Schmidtlein, a senior history and philosophy major said. “It’s kind of fun to be like, ‘oh, this kind of sounds like a circus thing, what’s the most circusy you can make it?’”
Their discography transports listeners to a multitude of places, with each universe being so different that it can be hard to believe they all came from the same four minds. One of their songs, “The Circus Song,” is Ringling Bros-esque with military-like drums beneath a deep, plucking bass and hallowing vocals. Another track on their 2022 self-titled album, “The Dream Song,” is the limbo between being asleep and being awake with a hazy, hypnotic guitar.
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While themes come easily, naming their creations is another story. The band admits they struggle with titles, resulting in many songs just being named directly after whatever its theme is.
All of the band members were introduced to music in different ways. Fellman, who started playing guitar at 13, formed a punk-rock band with a friend. They asked Belluscio to join as their drummer and he accepted, despite the fact that he “didn’t really play the drums” at the time.
“Through playing music with Bobby and [our other friend], I started then listening to music more seriously, and then that just got me into playing and listening,” Belluscio, an alum of this university, said.
Abdelmaksoud, a junior biology major, and Schmidtlein also played together in a different band in high school. They broke off as a duo shortly after Schmidtlein switched from playing guitar to bass, which was around the same time that Fellman and Belluscio were looking to replace their bass player. The duos merged, creating “The Odyssey,” and they’ve been playing together for about seven years since.
The group has always written their own songs. While Fellman, a junior philosophy major, wrote all of their early material, the process has become more collaborative over time. Often, one of the members will come to the others with a general idea of chords and a melody, but will purposely not write much more than that, so that they can allow everyone to pitch in.
“I might come along with a song ‘dodolododododo,’” Fellman said, mimicking the strumming of a guitar. “That’s all I have. But James will add the bassline ‘bum bum bum bum bum,’ Ali, ‘do do do,’ Michael, ‘prrrrrrr.’ And then it becomes a unit of four people putting something together.”
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Sunday afternoons, the band practices and jams in their basement studio to prepare for their various gigs. While a jam consists of listening to each other closely and adding onto what others are playing, it’s really about connection.
“We have almost a shared musical language with each other because we’ve been playing for so long,” Belluscio said.
As they work on their third album — satirically slated for release in the “late summer of 3022” — the band faces an uncertain future as they finish college, with this possibly being their “last hurrah.” No matter how much longer the group remains together, they just want people to have fun with their music, hoping people get up and dance to it.
“The only thing that I think I’m remotely concerned about is if people can tell I love music,” Schmidtlein said. “As long as people can hear that I love it, or that we love it, that’s all I care about.”
