Say the name Goblin and people recite the same sentence back at you: the band who scored Profondo Rosso. It is a fair thing to be known for and it has buried everything else they did. This is the everything else. In 1978, off the back of Suspiria, the quartet made a record with no film attached to it — a concept album about an insect, sung in Italian by a guitarist who had never sung before, conceived as the soundtrack to an animated feature that does not exist.

The short version

Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark is the fourth Goblin studio album, released on Cinevox in 1978. Claudio Simonetti plays keyboards and synthesisers; Massimo Morante plays guitars and sings and wrote all the lyrics; Fabio Pignatelli plays bass; Agostino Marangolo plays drums, with his brother Antonio guesting on saxophone. Bagarozzo is Roman dialect for cockroach. It is the second Goblin album not tied to a film, after Roller — with the caveat that three tracks, Le cascate di Viridiana, La danza and Notte, were subsequently used in George A. Romero’s Wampyr, known internationally as Martin.

A film that does not exist

The band wanted to prove they could work without the big screen, so they built their own screen. The album was conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary animated film in the manner of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, following Mark, a very small resident of the land of Goblin, through encounters with other odd creatures. The songs follow him downwards and then back up. Italian writers have always read the story as an allegory about drugs and what they were doing to young people in the cities at the end of the seventies, which is why an album with a comic title has such dark weather in it. The band never confirmed the reading and the tone stays deadpan throughout, which is part of what makes it strange.

The sound

Pure and at moments naive progressive rock, free of cinematic constraints, and the freedom is audible — one reviewer calls it the strongest thing Goblin did in the seventies precisely because the music had no film to serve. The combination that carries it is Simonetti’s heavy keyboards against Morante’s warm acoustic guitar, and Morante’s playing is repeatedly the icing on the cake. Simonetti plays far more organ and piano here than on any previous Goblin record, and an American listener rates some of that organ work among the best he has ever heard. The reference point people reach for is Keith Emerson at his most pompous. Elsewhere there are tempo changes that would not embarrass Van der Graaf Generator.

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The songs

Mark il bagarozzo opens on a funky Morante riff, tribal drumming from Agostino Marangolo and pulsing bass from Pignatelli, with Simonetti weaving hypnotic Moog over it and spoken, onomatopoeic interludes that one Italian writer calls almost Futurist. Le cascate di Viridiana is pompous psychedelia with Antonio Marangolo’s scratching saxophone riding over synthesised waterfalls. La danza is the dark peak and one of the Romero tracks. Terra di Goblin is ethereal — floating synths and dreamy guitars, celebrating the band’s imaginary homeland. Un ragazzo d’argento is the most electronic thing here. And ...E suono rock closes as an epic instrumental, which several people call the best track on the album.

Reception and legacy

The first real commercial failure of the band’s career: thirty thousand copies, which for Goblin after Suspiria was a flop, though it would have been a triumph for almost anybody else in this guide. The critics went hard at Morante’s singing — one Italian monograph calls the voice ungainly and some of the sounds needlessly pompous and stale — and opinion has never settled, with an American reviewer finding the vocals perfectly good and noting that plenty of people do not. What is not in dispute is what happened next: the record became a cult object for fans and collectors, and Goblin ended up more famous abroad than at home.

The verdict

Essential, and the answer to anyone who thinks Goblin were only a film band. ...E suono rock first, because the instrumental closer is where the argument is won. Then Mark il bagarozzo for the riff and the strangeness. Then Terra di Goblin. Then take it from the top and follow the story, which is odd and darker than the title admits. If you only know Profondo Rosso and Suspiria, this is the record that shows what those four could do when nobody was holding a stopwatch.

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