Wednesday, October 19, 2005  3:58 am 

Italian Masters of Horror

Argento - Milano Gospel

Rock rock it’s a planet rock, or is it?

I mean what’s with the kinda creepy flutes and stuff? Well we couldn’t really expect anything less from the son of Dario Argento(we might have made this bit up) on this late 80s world music italo outing could we? Apparently he likes to dress like Divine in special occasions too…

Its not dance music, its an intense psych out for some alternative world where Don Johnson was a coke fuelled paranoid Bret Easton Ellis character who only married Sheena Easton (no relation) to suck her soul dry and sell her to some awesome funk vampire god who’s name we dare not speak.

Voodoo chanting and rolling live drums verge into chemical breakbeat and manages to dwell on the right side of Moroder and xxjfg by the use of backward vocals, an evil rumble and a constant building urgency of dark intensity.

If you listen to this backward it says ‘do it, buy some Judas Priest’ (we might have made this bit up too).

(Juan gets in scary mode and sticks the proverbial lantern under his chin like this was the Simpsons Halloween special)

When I was small I used to spend the summers in my grandparent’s country house, they’d go to bed and I’d read H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe and Brian Lumley and try to scare myself shitless. A good trick was to get out of the house and watch the open window of my iluminated room (on the second floor) from outside, and wait, almost hope, for a dark silhouette to lean from it and stare back at me. It never happened, but sometimes I wished so hard I almost managed to see something.

I’d also get together with my cousins and we’d tell scary stories, the best one was about this old priest, a retired exorcist who happened to be a confessor in a catholic school in the area. He’d tell the kids there about this little boy in a remote village who was possessed by the devil and who, tied to his bed, would utter the most undescribable profanities against every conceivable saint, except for the Virgin Mary. When the old exorcist came to his house and asked him for the reason why he never insulted her, the little boy nodded towards the wooden crucifix hanging from the wall and replied ‘He told me not to cuss his mother’.

EEEK!

Anyway, I hope you are in the right frame of mind to face the master’s tricks, yeah, we’re not joking here, we’re talking Ennio motherfucking Morricone, the stuff of legend, who besides all those badass western tunes we all know, also did, back in the days, his share of Giallo soundtracking, some of which is documented in the stunning Crime and Dissonance double cd recently released by Ipecac records. Lots of heavy breathing and nasty violins in this album, we utterly love it.

Ennio Morricone- L’Attentato (Version 1 conducted by Nicola Samale)

The track we are posting today is actually from L’Attentato, not an horror slash slasher, but a political thriller, still you’ll have to admit the whole thing is so blood-chilllingly eerie and tense it’s not hard to imagine, while you listen, Dario Argento’s bony hands brandishing a knife, slowly but unavoidably approaching that pretty girl’s throat, the rest is red.

(Actually this track is very Goblin, had to at least mention them in the Italian masters of terror post!! For Halloween we might try to get ye the ace Profondo Rosso cover by Midnight Mike featuring Zongamin, we can’t promise anything though)

labels >> xxjfg