On their debut album, Italian band A.M.E.N. used Aleister Crowley's writings to give their avant-garde jazz a mysterious esoteric tinge. For their second album, Vittorio Sabelli (Dawn Of A Dark Age, Incantvm), Erba del Diavolo (lead singer of occult doom band Ponte Del Diavolo) and their companions take a slightly different approach. The album's title, Argento, leaves little doubt that the legendary director of Suspiria, Profondo Rosso and Inferno is the inspiration here. We also notice that the album has fewer but longer tracks.
The result is inevitably less scattered. You soon realise that A.M.E.N. are adopting a certain classicism and crafting their dark atmospheres rather than launching themselves feverishly into the dissonant madness of free-jazz. Elegant piano, thick brass, misty clarinet, smoky heaviness: it's more like New Orleans than a giallo. What's more, don't expect too many synthesizers or Claudio Simonetti-style ‘Goblinesque’ progressive experimentation (which doesn't stop the baroque touches of the hypnotic Magia from having a few shades of it): A.M.E.N. leave their metal background in the wardrobe and plunge into a jazz/blues mix with experimentations more turned towards mysteries from the past than psychedelic delirium.
However, Erba Del Diavolo, ‘the Devil's weed’, only needs to add her voice to give the tracks their mystical, incantatory content. Brindisi sets the scene: repetition, heaviness... All the ingredients of doom metal are there, except for the saturated guitars. A.M.E.N.'s jazz is dark, menacing, sometimes opaque, and a kind of melancholy sets in as the tracks unfold like sinister stories told in Italian. You might think that these obscure rituals belong more in a 50s film noir than in Dario's colourful 70s dazzle, but that doesn't detract from their charm.
After all, there are corpses, there is murder, there are mysteries. The titles say it all. A nocturnal whodunit atmosphere with hints of the occult: you lose yourself in these long, enigmatic tracks just as you find yourself wandering the winding streets of an ancient European city plunged in the fog, guided by the jolts of Omicidio's double bass. There's no doubt that a faceless menace lurks in the shadows. What could be more giallo?
Argento is an album that knows how to give its intimate atmosphere a theatrical touch. The album has the scent of a seance in a cosy living room, of an ill-famed tavern where you play cards before reading your doom in them, of a damp, deserted alleyway from which emerges a figure wearing leather gloves. A mandolin for the Latin touches, an organ for the grandiose: A.M.E.N. fleshes out its mass with different nuances, an oppressive, haunted kaleidoscope.
