LA CHIESA

In this album released in the late 80´s, Goblin has slightly neglected their characteristic jazzy "frenetic" rock to concentrate on the darkest and most symphonic part of their music. By consequence the music is clearly dedicated to Dario Argento´s movie. The doom, sinister atmosphere is essentialy provided by church organ parts, electronic loops. The result provides a "malefic" synth symphony. "The Church" combines use of curch organ musical sentences and electronic drums, synth rythmical motifs. "Prelude 24" is a free organ interpretation of a composition by Bach. "Possessione" is a mysterious, creepy musical piece with linear atmospheric synth lines, a doom bass line and voices in the distance. Progressively the orchestration is more detailed and finnaly turn into a plaintive symphonic chant. "lotte" is a poor symphonic synth attempt made of human chorus imitations and electronic gadget. Not the best Goblin, this album is above all functional

La Chiesa was a 1989 movie directed by Michele Soavi who was a protégé of Dario Argento. Argento was highly involved in the project by filling in the producer and the scriptwriting duties. To make things even more exciting two of Argento's collaborators Goblin and Keith Emerson were brought in to write some original music for the movie.

I'm not sure what motivation lay behind this idea and my original thought was that such a collaboration would never work out, but that was exactly what made me interested in exploring this material. After listening to the album it's obvious that I was somewhat misled by my original assumption since Goblin and Keith Emerson don't actually collaborate on the album. Instead they have composed and performed their compositions individually where Keith Emerson is responsible for tracks number 1,3,5,9 and 10 while Goblin perform tracks number 2,4,6,11,12,13. So what happened to tracks 7 and 8, you might ask? Well those tracks feel completely out of place since Go To Hell by Zooming On The Zoo is a typical 80's dance tune and yes... it even evolves a rap. As for The Wire Blaze by Definitive Gaze it basically sounds like a bad copy of Morrissey which, once again, has no place on this soundtrack.

Keith Emerson's compositions weren't really as interesting as I have hoped for and with the exception of the main theme make the music here feel quite dull. That is unless you're into Emerson's classical music arrangement. Goblin's music, on the other hand, keeps this whole soundtrack afloat and although it feels as though they didn't have the complete artistic freedom here they still managed to do a decent job on all their compositions.

This album is too much of a mixed bag to receive anything higher than collectors/fans only rating from me. I wish that Cinevox could re-release Goblins material just like they did on Phenomena - The Complete Soundtrack and compile it all on one album.

**** star songs: The Church (Main Theme) (3:58) La Chiesa (5:23) Possessione (3:17) Lotte (3:03) La Chiesa (Suite) (4:05) Suspence Chiesa 1 (3:44)

*** star songs: Prelude 24 (From Well Tempered Clavier) (2:23) The Possession (2:25) The Wire Blaze (3:40) The Church Revisited (4:25) The Church (Single Mix Bonus Track) (3:53) Suspence Chiesa 2 (7:05)

** star songs: Go To Hell (3:40)