Witches by Dante Tomaselli (Album)
Composed by Dante Tomaselli
Filmmaker Dante Tomaselli has made a few independent horror films, and now he’s making independent horror music. Witches, his latest full-length release, is a very confused beast. It just doesn’t know quite what it wants to be.
At times, like the opening track “Atheist,” we have ambient pieces overlaid with audio clips of preachers like cult leader Jim Jones. Others aren’t far removed from Halloween sound effect albums with creaking doors and screams from hell. Yet, other tracks are more musically akin to synth-heavy darkwave bands.
At 13 tracks, there’s a lot of room for this variety, but the whole affair lacks cohesion. From track to track, we’re thrown between genres with no apparent rhyme or reason. One might expect a thematic link between the songs, but I was unable to detect one, other than religious themes from the audio samples. Most of Tomaselli’s filmography has similar religious themes, so this isn’t a surprise, but the overall lack of direction isn’t what you’d expect from a storyteller.
The collection isn’t without highlights. The more musical tracks are enjoyable and do a solid job of setting a mood. But the remainder vacillates from experimental to random: lots of noise without being industrial, those spoken audio clips peppered throughout yet never really coming together to make a point.
Track Listing:
1 “Atheist”
2 “The Devil”
3 “Kundalini Serpent”
4 “Lucid Dreaming”
5 “Caverns of Hell”
6 “Religion”
7 “Witches’ Sabbath”
8 “The Moon”
9 “River Styx”
10 “The Black Hole”
11 “Witch Hunt”
12 “The Dungeon”
13 “The Ocean”
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Album
Categorized:Reviews
