Album of the day: Umberto – Prophecy Of The Black Widow (CD)

Praise for Umberto‘s Prophecy Of The Black Widow from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: It’s about a month late for Halloween, but we’re still pretty thrilled that this Record Of The Week from last year is now available as a CD! Here’s what we said about the original vinyl version which we got in October, last year:

We LOVED the previous Umberto album, From The Grave, and are stoked that he / they / it  have finally returned with another full length packed with oodles of Goblin-y goodness, just in time for Halloween!!
But the sound of the Expo 70-associated Umberto is not strictly that scary, at least not all the time. In fact, like Goblin and other ’80s Italian fright-film soundtrackers, most of the scary stuff here is really just an *underlying* un-ease, a sinister suspenseful undercurrent over which more “groovy” stuff gets down.

And way more groovy this one most definitely is, some serious haunted dancefloor action, or horror movie disco, or whatever you want to call it, but Umberto has for sure upped the funk / groove quotient, lacing the usual cocktail of thick, tense, pulsing synth throb, minimal motorik rhythms and heavy ominous drones with plenty of funky basslines, crunchy modulated keyboard buzz, soaring synths, chanted voices and propulsive grooves…

Here and there, the sound gets all stripped down leaving just gurgly, crumbly distorted low end peppered with spaced out booming rhythms, or creepy ambient atmospheres, but the songs tend to slip quickly back into haunted shuffly rhythms, woozy horror movie atmospherics, ominous strings laced funky grooves and dark descending bass blarp.

The second side begins with one of those tracks that sounds like the music that always introduces us to the main character in all those seventies thrillers, the little girl playing with her dollies, the old woman in the garden, the sound is tranquil but subtly sinister, here it’s a music box like melody, plinking dreamily beneath haunting strings, and soft swirls of creepy voice like synth, total horror movie soundtrack shivers for sure.

After that it’s back to wah guitars, chiming bells, groovy Italo funk haunted dancefloor grooviness, but this time with some cool washed out M83 style female vocal textures, a shoegazey gauze over that propulsive Goblin-y groove.

If we had to pick a single song that was THE ONE here, it would probably be ‘Someone Chasing Someone Through A House’ which sounds exactly LIKE THAT, pulsing throbbing synths, electronic squelches, deep ominous drones, dark swells, foreboding and creepy and tense and SCARY!

The album ends with an upbeat track entitled ‘Everything Is Going To Be Ok’, all sun-coming-up, yay we survived the zombie onslaught good cheer & cheesiness. The sort of music that plays over the closing credits, or even better, over the final shot which lulls you into a sense of false security, before a decaying hand bursts through the ground, or a beast explodes from the water and drag our heroine out of the boar, some sort of shock to let you know that evil won’t stay buried… which of course usually leads to a sequel, and we are definitely looking forward to the next installment of groovy Gobliny sonic scares from Umberto!

At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.

Tags: Album of the day, Aquarius Records, Not Not Fun, Prophecy Of The Black Widow, psychedelica, Umberto

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 at 5:48 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.