Goblin made this album specifically to get away from film music. No director, no cues, no stopwatch — just five men and the freedom their success had bought them. And then it became a soundtrack anyway. Romero’s Wampyr already had a score by Donald Rubinstein, but the Italian edition of the film wanted Goblin, so the distributors simply took the instrumentals off Roller and used those instead. An Italian critic put it exactly right: not born as a soundtrack, but turned into one after the fact.

The short version

Roller is the second Goblin album, released on Cinevox in 1976 and partly recorded the year before. Six tracks, all instrumental. The line-up has changed twice over: Walter Martino is gone, replaced by Agostino Marangolo from Flea, and Maurizio Guarini has joined as a second keyboard player, making this a quintet with Claudio Simonetti, Massimo Morante and Fabio Pignatelli. This is the band that toured for a solid year, from November 1975 to November 1976 — forty-six dates around Italy, television slots, the Festival dei Gruppi at Pesaro. The first time Goblin were a live group rather than a studio one.

The freedom

Profondo Rosso sold a million copies and the reward was permission. Roller is what they did with it: no film to serve, so the band go through progressive rock, jazz and funk in one record, and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic note the difference immediately — a new lease of freedom unavailable in their sometimes rather constricting soundtrack work. The self-reference is deliberate too. Around three and a half minutes into the title track there is a bridge that is unmistakably Profondo Rosso, smoothed out and quoted back at you. They knew exactly what they were famous for.

The sound

A highly symphonic blend of Italian prog, funk and rock with the dark tinge they could not have removed if they wanted to. The engine is the rhythm section: Pignatelli’s deep, resonating, sometimes fretless bass, which one reviewer describes as a funkier Chris Squire, and Marangolo’s masterful hard-jazz drumming. That is worth stating plainly, because Simonetti and Morante collect most of the credit and it is Marangolo who holds this record together. Above them the dual keyboard attack — comparable to the Nocenzi brothers in Banco, or Greenslade — lays out clavinet, electric piano, Moogs and Eminent, the Italian answer to the Mellotron.

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The songs

Roller opens and is the most film-like thing here, trademark keyboards pushed towards the progressive side, and it is the one with the self-quotation buried in the bridge. Aquaman is liquid and propulsive with a clear aftertaste of Santana. Snip-Snap is amusing Italo-funk. Il risveglio del serpente does what its title promises and slithers. Dr Frankenstein is moody and sombre. And then Goblin closes the record at eleven minutes and is the reason people who love this album love this album — one reviewer has kept it on his podium since the day it came out in 1976.

Reception and legacy

It did not sell the way they hoped, and the Italian criticism is specific: the sound refines, softens and becomes more personal than on Profondo Rosso, but it also settles into shapes common to a lot of mid-seventies bands, and the record lacks a personality of its own — a gap the same musicians closed by structuring the next album far more tightly. The counterweight is just as firm: for many listeners this remains an Italian progressive classic and the best early Goblin record precisely because no film is in the way. Guarini left afterwards, and the band went back to soundtracks with Suspiria.

The verdict

Essential, and the one to play for someone who thinks Goblin were a gimmick. Goblin first, all eleven minutes, and if that does not convince you nothing on the Argento records will. Then the title track, listening for the bridge. Then Aquaman for the Santana. Then Bagarozzo, because Roller is the album that made the next one possible — and the criticism of this record is the exact thing that record fixes. A band who bought their freedom with a horror film and spent it on funk.

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