The Black
Golgotha

The impulsive rock scene in Italy not only boasts an enviable progressive scene (obviously limited to the glorious seventies), but also a handful of obscure metal bands that, although not historically significant in changing the genre's destiny, have achieved decent success among insiders, becoming true cult phenomena.

Narrowing down the discussion to the doom genre, I would certainly cite an ideal triad of shady figures who go by the names of Antonio Bartoccetti (Jacula, Antonius Rex), Paolo Catena (Death's, Violet Theatre, etc.), and the protagonist of this review, the Abruzzese Mario Di Donato (born in 1951!), aka The Black.

Active since the seventies decade, our arcane strummer came to prominence by playing in bands like Unreal Terror and Requiem, but probably the best incarnation of his art is named The Black, a solo project born in 1989 with the hallucinatory "Reliquarium": suspended between doom, classic heavy metal, and progressive tradition, the music of the project shines with chanting in Latin, tense and sacred atmospheres, and free guitar play without rules, capable of traversing the most diverse directors, amidst metallic assaults, acrobatic progressive flashes, oblique hallucinations, and inaccuracies of all sorts.

But Our Man is not only a remarkable guitarist and a modest singer, but also an excellent painter, a quality that the national Mario certainly does not hide, adorning the packaging of his works with his good and vivid paintings, often centered on sacred themes. Much like his music, it obsessively investigates the ancestral fears of man that arise from ancient beliefs and superstitions. All, of course, in a way that is light years away from the playful treatment that dominates the genre, closer instead to the meticulousness of an art historian. His two passions (pictorial art and music) are inseparable, so much so that critics have coined two illuminating expressions to describe his art ("Ars Mentis", Fantastic Art of the Mind, and "Metal Mentis", Metal of the Mind). That the two strands proceed hand in hand is clear when we scroll through the titles of the band's abundant discography: "Infernus, Purgatorium et Paradisus" (1991), "Abbatia Scl. Clementis" (1993), "Refugium Peccatorum" (1995), "Apocalypsis" (1996) etc.

"Golgotha", the sixth album in The Black saga, released in 2000 by the essential Black Widow, is no exception. It's no exception from a "visual" standpoint, as the album features two famous oil paintings by Di Donato: "Postmortem" on the cover and "Il Dolore di Maria" on the back. But it is no exception even from a conceptual point of view, as the work, significantly straddling two millennia, is shrouded in apocalyptic moods, what we could call "universal judgment", denouncing the senseless violence and chaos that still pervades human history, especially at the end of the second millennium.

The exception, however, is found from a strictly musical point of view, because, despite the solid concept behind it (as is the case with all other works by the band), the work, despite its brevity, is heterogeneous in its contents, presenting texts in both Italian and Latin (the latter, in truth, being set aside, since the album is almost entirely sung in the mother tongue), contemplating original pieces and daring covers, showing discontinuity between very long compositions and very short interludes, instrumental and non-instrumental tracks. Yet there is a sense of cohesion that makes the listening experience smooth and homogeneous: in my opinion, we hold in our hands one of the band's best works (though not the most representative).

We start with the airy keyboards of the symphonic introduction "Momenti Ansiosi". But this is only the beginning: a captivating guitar riff opens the album, introducing the highlight, the beautiful title track, a poignant "doom ballad" that stands among the best things ever produced by the band. Di Donato's spoken word recalls a dramatic Renato Zero (!!!) unusually afflicted by the fate of humanity; the dreamy interplay between keyboards and guitar and the final acceleration tint the track with Black Sabbath, making it worthy of featuring among the Italian rock classics. With "II° Orbis (II Vers)" the pace picks up: the track is a blow of rough doom'n'roll that certainly brings us back to the band's past; the singing in Latin returns, recited by a maliciously slowed voice, a gimmick that darkens the album's most intense moment.

From the most classically heavy track of the batch, we smoothly transition to an incredible cover of I Corvi: the perverse love story told in "Sospesa a un Filo", from '66, a remake of "I Had too much to Dream" by the Electric Prunes. An atypical episode, considering an artist like Di Donato, but which ultimately doesn't look out of place, as the piece's originally beat tones are transformed by the rock fury the band knows how to impart (let's remember the admirable work of the faithful Enio Nicolini on bass and Gianluca Bracciale on drums). A short guitar interlude (the lively "Il Re Melograno") precedes the grandeur of another instrumental piece, "Ultimatum", tasked with closing the first part of the album: here, the solemn fusion of guitar and organ (an instrument that will infest the entire work with celestial sacredness, something that doesn’t always happen in The Black's music) return to enchant.

Caput II restores the album's conceptual unity, representing its better-crafted portion. The brief introduction “Tormentum”, another elegant organ-based interlude, thus paves the way for a pair of stunning tracks where the band can finally unleash all its progressive fury, up to this point silenced. "Iustitia" is formidable in its acrobatic games where Di Donato's guitar constantly changes skin, erecting colossal walls of steamroller metal and shattering in intricate passages of sublime and oppressive progressive doom. Particularly the instrumental tail end is potent in drawing granite bifurcations of guitar and organ, as the best Italian dark tradition demands, and not coincidentally echoing the ghost of the mysterious Antonius Rex by Antonio Bartoccetti and the most catacombic and inquisitory Paul Chain. Between Italian and Latin, the track brings the album back to the glories of the past, but the ten minutes of the monumental "Il Giudizio", a crazy reinterpretation of the most famous track by Il Rovescio della Medaglia, are equally noteworthy, a choice that reaffirms the close link between The Black and the tricolor progressive tradition. What to say: opened by the dark drumbeat, the suite by Il Rovescio della Medaglia is an exhausting guitar jam where Di Donato unleashes his uncontainable creativity (frankly, making it hard for his two companions to keep up), resurrecting the track through the heaviness of the most archaic and visionary Sabbaths. Di Donato is certainly not a virtuoso on the six strings, but he is skilled in quickly changing the atmosphere and crawling with the grace of an elephant along the vast expanses of music that are pictorial and have a strong visual impact. The idyll is destined to conclude, and we are left with only the brief minute of the concluding "Coscientia Opprimi", slumped on the offbeat, bouncing, surreal notes of keyboards and piano.

A step below in terms of innovation, experimental verve, and technical prowess the unattainable Bartoccetti and Catena, Di Donato certainly deserves the attention and respect not only of all lovers of the formidable "Italia Oscura", but also of all those who feel a tremendous nostalgia for that era when music seemed to have no boundaries, and the only limit set was to fully indulge in fantasy and creativity.

To be resurrected.