Gothica
Night Thoughts

The Cold Meat Industry is famous in the world of dark music for launching some of the best groups in the genre and for also bringing fame to numerous Italian ensembles, including Gothica. Never was a name more fitting for a group; the duo composed of Alessandra Santovito and Roberto Del Vecchio indeed offers us a darkwave with deeply dark, labyrinthine tones, almost architectural semblances of a journey through narrow passages, niches, gloomy undergrounds, and majestic spires, garnished with hints of Mediterranean melancholy.

The work under review is the band's debut "Night Thoughts," the first of two works after which unfortunately the group will disband. This album, like its successor, is certainly a work of very high quality, nearing a masterpiece. After all, with a cover that reflects Friedrich's "The Abbey in the Oakwood," we could only be faced with a work of art. The album opens with "Stagione Oscura", a short elegy of keyboards crowned by the sound of a melancholic flute and verses in the mother tongue. But it is only the beginning of a journey that touches ever different genres: ethnic moments with a Dead Can Dance flavor (see "Spirit Of The Dead", "Spirit Dance", "The Land Under The Waves") alternate with flashes of gloomy and oppressive folk (as in "Nothingness") or with barely industrial touches (the instrumental "Lost In Reverie"). We then reach masterpieces of rare beauty with "Penelope", a lament with obsessive singing and Mediterranean gloom, and with "Proserpina", whose beautiful text is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, without forgetting the more "horror" tracks of the album, the stunning "Medusa" and the dark waltz "The Pure Nymph" (so lugubrious that I would see both in a Goblin soundtrack). It is up to "Sepulchres", a mournful requiem in Spanish, to close the album with its funeral march (which recalls something of Dark Sanctuary). Both singers have wonderful voices; Alessandra easily changes style from ethnic vocalizations to lyrical singing to a more dreamy, almost mantric style, while Roberto expresses himself with a deep, dark tone that perfectly suits the genre.

In short, an excellent work and an irreplaceable loss in a scene that now takes refuge in tacky electronics and where few truly deserve the success attributed to them.