Paul Chain Violet Theatre
Detaching From Satan

"This album is the first of a series (I hope) that marks the evolution of DEATH SS into VIOLET THEATRE or rather the abandonment of Satanism, now considered by us an inferior and futile ideology. The main concept on which the VIOLET THEATRE is built is the ancient philosophy of death or purple magic of which I have always been, more or less unconsciously, a faithful follower."

PAUL CHAIN VIOLET THEATRE is a continuous and evolutionary exploration in the dark, with evolution being the foundation of our ideology. The constant change of my androgynous personality compels me to divide the same concept into different sectors and musical formations without any genre limitations, even to demonstrate that the same can be said in different ways, something many people pretend not to know or have long forgotten."

The lineup of this record is a trio (Gilas is a guest) and the sung language is not English."

Eternally yours

I bring you this piece written by Paul Chain himself as I believe these are the best words to describe the content of this "Detaching from Satan," the legendary EP that inaugurates the new era of the Abruzzese musician following his departure from Death SS. A work that, despite its brief duration, has a symbolic, prophetic meaning, a motum primum for Paul Chain's entire solo career. It is the work that marks an initial and clear conceptual dissociation with a certain way of understanding and making music, and some even call it Paul Chain's fundamental work. And indeed, we are talking about a sensational work: reviewing the four tracks present here, we can easily understand why Paolo Catena has become over time a cult figure within the national and international underground metal scene.

The year was 1984. The music proposed by the founder of Death SS possesses a strong innovative charge, although the style adopted remains strongly indebted to the upheaval brought into the rock world fifteen years earlier by the indispensable Black Sabbath. But despite appearances, the discourse goes further, stripping the heavy-rock of Iommi & company from all freak/hippie/blues temptations, moving towards the formidable shores of that metaphysical psycho-doom that Paolo Catena will forge in the following years. The “detachment” from Satan alluded to in the title should not, however, be misleading: the music of Violet Theatre remains something terribly dark and morbid for the metal landscape of the time.

We start with the historic cover, which in its didactic simplicity explicitly conveys a rawness in addressing the theme of Death that takes us light years away from the pseudo-satanist antics professed by early eighties metal (facing Death barehanded, without the need for frills or masks).

Paul Chain, even from an iconographic point of view, assumes a more sober image, and from the extravagances of Death SS, we rediscover him in a deadly black and white photo, halfway between a corpse and a dark priest, a double identity mirror of his controversial personality, suspended between attraction to Death and irreparable fear of it. But it is musically speaking that Paul Chain manages to assert himself, not only confirming his qualities as a composer and skilled guitarist, but in the ability to create tense and dramatic atmospheres, serving the most typical Sabbathian heavy-doom to a restless existentialism that still today (despite the limits of extreme having been pushed much further) knows how to send shivers down your spine.

Certainly, we are still speaking the language of heavy-metal in its most canonical form, but in substance, Paul Chain's discourse already shines from the compositional freedom that will distinguish his path: the more properly psychedelic component is still contained in a reassuring song format, but already in these four compositions, Chain's improvised and uncontrollable guitar work, between twisted bursts and well-embedded electro-acoustic delirium among the grooves left by energetic riffs blacker than pitch, presents those elements that will lead in the future to the definitive breaking of any space-time scheme in increasingly varied and surprising albums, capable of towering far and wide until reaching the shores of the most cultured progressive, the most hallucinatory avant-garde, and the most visionary space-rock.

In this perspective, the choice not to sing in English but to abandon oneself to an invented language is of little relevance: a trick that smells more than anything else of the need to avoid confronting the English language, with which the good Chain seems to have fought since middle school, obviously coming out of it with broken bones.

No, if Chain with this album manages to push the boundaries of the extreme, it is not through the subversion of metal canons, nor with violence (and his music is certainly not light), but through the Cult of Death, a philosophical assumption that imprints his music with an aura of absolute melancholy: between rough moments and more reflective passages, in these four tracks there is much of the doom that will come, including the most depressed of today.

"Occultism" opens with organ and bass dissonances: the piece explodes with Hendrixian fury (but a demonic Hendrix in the grip of horrendous hallucinations), Paul Dark's bass roars in the darkness, Eric Lumen's drums hit hard, counter-times, beats with heavy funky vigor that transports Chain's black guitar into metaphysical dimensions hitherto unknown to the metal world.

Church moods, solemn sacred choruses precede the explosion of "Armageddon", an authentic blow that I like to include among the best things combined by maestro Catena: granite riffs, obsessive tempos, an oblique chorus that makes it clear how Chain's metal is the result of inspiration that is the physiological artistic counterpart of a restless nature in perpetual unresolved search for an answer to the reason of Death.

"Welcome to Hell" (a sort of “Foxy Lady” of Darkness) is the album's strong piece, where Chain's voice becomes acidic and ungraceful, his demonic and blasphemous vocals freeze the listener, leading him, amid accelerations and slowdowns, into an abyss that is difficult to name. The track will be revisited about ten years later in the masterpiece “Alkahest” with none other than Lee Dorrian behind the microphone: hearing these terrible notes, it is not hard to imagine the future founder of Cathedral as a pimply teenager drooling over a track that at the time could be classified as one of the nastiest things ever produced by the human race.

"Detaching from Satan" finds its fulfillment in the almost eight minutes of "17 Day", which represents the darkest and doom-laden side of Paul Chain's music: the sharp riffs that until a moment ago had cut our ears give way to unsettling phrasing of a putrefied and constantly morphing guitar that builds a sonic monument of Death and Damnation that seems to open many paths. Against the backdrop of these desolate landscapes stands Gilas' distorted vocal interpretation, who, as the black bard of the abyss (his approach more theatrical compared to Chain's mystical inclination) moves uncertain and limping, halfway between the decadent spleen inherited directly from the early eighties dark-wave tradition and the roughness of the most boorish and fanatical Steve Sylvester. Impossible not to mention the organ interlude by Chain himself, which tears through the black veil of the Violet Theatre with bleak visions and arcane liturgies. Incredible, finally, the terrible ending that fades out after unmissable solos and choruses that seem to come from the Underworld. In all this, the track is already able to outline a new concept of doom, where the macabre reigns supreme in a hideous rollercoaster of enormously negative emotions. And, I am certain, in this proliferation of musicians in Italian lands dedicated to dark and even blasphemous atmospheres (the infamous Italian “innercircle,” dark-metal or horror metal, as it may be called), the looming presence of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church has an indisputable weight.

Not much else to add: a must-have without ifs and buts.