Dick Says: Italy Gave Us So Much More Than Just Ron Jeremy in the 70's and 80's

The other day I came to the realization that I have recently developed an obsession. This obsession happens to be with film score music - particularly electronic prog-rock composed by Italian dudes from the 70's through 80's. Like the many other monkeys on my back, this one is beginning to scream and cause all kinds of hell unless I succumb to its demands.

This realization was sparked when I found out that the Brian De Palma classic Scarface is FINALLY getting a proper release on Blu-Ray next week. Why it took so long to get this gem on a high-definition format while tripe (albeit delicious, hilarious tripe) like Troll 2 has been out for nearly a year eludes me entirely. If you're even half the baller I am, then you should be springing for the $700 Limited Edition Humidor set, which appears to be shamelessly targeted for the Scarface-obsessed hip hop mogul crowd.

Anyway! In sheer anticipation for my overpriced commemorative purchase to arrive, I decided to watch Scarface the other day and was reminded of just how superb of a job Italian composer Giorgio Moroder did on the soundtrack.

This is the part where I come clean and admit that I didn't drop the seven hundo on the humidor... but I am still dead goddamned serious about the music.

Around the same era in movies was George Romero's 1978 opus Dawn of the Dead. This film's particularly bad-ass score and was provided by Italian prog-rock band Goblin. As a group, Goblin was fairly prolific when it came to cranking out soundtracks to various cheesy Italian horror films - many of which are upheld as cult classics in their genre. Sure, they weren't as hot-shit as our pal Giorgio (the dude was involved in about a bazillion major Hollywood film soundtracks in the 80's), but what they put out was clearly a style which was cherished by many and later revived by recent bands such as Zombi.

Like I said, guys like Steve Moore of Zombi have been taking this whole aesthetic and going crazy with it. Under the pseudonym Gianni Rossi there have been some pretty cool soundtracks put out by Moore to goofy, low-budget slasher films. Said soundtracks are all in the same vein by being Moog-heavy, otherworldly, and otherwise hella creepy.

The sound of all this stuff is quite distinct and really stands out as a unique time for music. There is a borderline "corny" factor to be said about the extreme use of synthesizer, but it doesn't take long for such a style to become endearing. Contemporary bands like Zombi have taken some liberties in modernizing things a tad, but the core aesthetic is still clearly there and really requires little improvement.