Goblin
For an evening rooted in the sludgy-shimmery synths, crunchy guitars and baroque excesses of exploitation cinema at its most splattery, The Spin found Goblin’s Tennessee debut to be an overwhelmingly joyous affair, with the vibe like that of a house party. The intimacy of Exit/In yielded an experience for a gathering of horror fans, prog rockers and disco demons that LCD Soundsystem would probably write a song about.
Morricone Youth
Openers Morricone Youth, an NYC quartet that specializes in crafting new scores for films, showcased material from their work on Mad Max and Night of The Living Dead. But the band turned the most heads with a tease of their next work, a re-score of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Their set was fun and peppy, and they set the stage well for the coming of Goblin.
The venerable prog ensemble began with three pieces from 2001’s Sleepless, their most recent collaboration with acclaimed director Dario Argento, a suite that established the structure of their set: compositions grouped together by film, exploring the different moods they brought to the sound of mayhem. The film excerpts projected behind Goblin, sometimes refracted kaleidoscopically, deconstructed the visual element to such an extent that even when revealing major plot points (or, more often than not, kills), the experience never felt disrespectful to the work. Some audience members seemed a bit taken aback by some of the gore, but when the synth hits and snare drums found visual echoes in the exploding supporting cast of 1980’s Contamination, it was one of those truly special Music City moments.
Goblin
We dug head Goblin guitarist Massimo Morante, who mostly played seated, but was more than capable of shredding and making fists pump and devil horns fly. It makes a difference when a band is having fun, and that’s as contagious as the aforementioned erupting extras. The band spent the majority of the set showcasing its film-score body of work, but also dipped into their non-score studio records. That included material from Roller and 4 of a Kind, as well as a temporally unmoored and oddly moving encore run through “E Suono Rock” from 1978’s Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark.
The biggest responses were to the show-closing trio of pieces from Suspiria (which isn’t that big of a surprise) and the George Romero mini-tribute from Dawn of the Dead/Zombi. Hearing how bands rework their arrangements is fascinating under any circumstances, and with Goblin even moreso. There’s a stretch during the Suspiria main title wherein we could feel the kick drum reshaping the beat into a seductively groovy 4/4 and everything got kind of bottom heavy. Likewise, they turned it out on the Zombi pieces, amping up the sonic impact and making the light fixtures pulse.
But the moment right after the sleazy acid-bath disco of “Buio Omega,” when keyboardist Aidan Zammit broke out the vocoder and introduced “Tenebre” in shifted, robotic tones — that was our personal fave, unleashing four or so minutes of goth-disco majesty. You know what it takes to get Nashville audiences to dance.
See our slideshow for more photos.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
