Goad
Dusketha

With Dusketha, GOAD continue on a path that now stretches across almost half a century of Italian progressive history, always moving along that border where music becomes poetic narration.

Maurilio Rossi, the mind and soul of the project, once again builds a personal and coherent sonic universe: he composes, writes the lyrics, sings, and plays most of the instruments, surrounding himself with a small group of trusted collaborators who broaden the scope of the work with wind, string, and percussion arrangements. Max Cirone's production, based on the bounce to bounce technique (a continuous passage between digital and analog), gives the album a unique warmth, a patina of authenticity that recalls the tangible, physical listening experience of vintage vinyl records.

The double album — 18 tracks for over 155 minutes of music — is conceived as an ideal continuation of Titania and La Belle Dame, yet opens up to a broader horizon. Rossi had discovered, while working with John Keats’s verses, such a richness of musical inspiration that he decided to continue that poetic dialogue over several chapters. Dusketha therefore deepens that lyrical universe, also welcoming other authors: Jorie Graham, Edgar Lee Masters, T. S. Eliot, Lovecraft and more, alongside original lyrics written by Rossi himself.

Musically, the album moves within an introspective realm, where piano, organ, and mellotron draw suspended spaces, and the melodies develop like streams of consciousness. The vocal lines, often overdubbed or harmonized with themselves, create a sense of inner dialogue, as if they were characters responding to each other from different places in memory. Rossi’s voice does not seek perfection, but presence: it is raspy, emotional, at times restless, as if every phrase has to cross through matter before becoming song.

The double CD also features a previously unreleased track linked to the group’s long history: The Wood Dedicated to Lovecraft from 2004 is here completely re-performed, recorded onto analog tape, mixed on DAT, and finally digitized. From this same core comes “The Garden with Spectral Gleams”, a piece that uses the lyrics from H. P. Lovecraft’s poem The Garden, blending literary evocation and soundscape with cinematic force. Among the surprises, a bonus track inspired by Walter de la Mare and Elisabeth Madox Roberts stands out for its ironic and light tone: a deliberately retro swing episode, crafted as a tribute to mid-twentieth-century orchestration, which gracefully breaks the tension of the rest of the album.

Dusketha is a work that offers no shortcuts. It does not seduce with easy melodies but invites immersion. Those who allow themselves to be carried by its slowness will discover a world of echoes, references, and reverberations, where the music seems to breathe the same air as the poems that inspire it. While ideally conversing with classic prog — from the Van Der Graaf Generator to the Genesis, passing through darker and more lyrical territories of the genre — the album stands out for its personal and handcrafted vision, closer to a sonic diary than an exercise in style. Dusketha is twilight as a creative moment: a threshold between light and shadow where Rossi continues to seek the fragile beauty of words and sounds. A cultured, coherent, and deeply human work, capable of transforming listening into an act of contemplation. https://mykingdommusic.bandcamp.com/album/dusketha