** First LP edition ever on Clear Lilac vinyl. Gatefold cover with 60x30cm insert. ** Long hidden in the folds of Italian cult cinema, Il Ras del Quartiere finally steps into the light as a fully fledged entry in the Goblin canon. The 1983 film by Carlo Vanzina, starring Diego Abatantuono and Isabella Ferrari, stitched together American‑style action dynamics with the elastic timing of Italian comedy, creating a strange hybrid that has since become a beloved late‑night staple. Until now, its music has remained an almost mythical presence: instantly recognizable to fans who wore out their VHS tapes, but never granted a proper standalone release.
For the soundtrack, Vanzina turned to Goblin at a moment when the group were evolving beyond their 1970s horror‑prog fame. The band responded with four original tracks composed by Fabio Pignatelli and Marco Rinalduzzi, recorded at Trafalgar Recording Studios in Rome under the expert ears of sound engineer Gaetano Ria. Instead of rehashing their earlier gothic intensity, they carved out a sleek fusion of rock muscle and electronic sheen, gliding bass lines and punchy drums locked to shining synth figures and guitar motifs that occasionally brush against the cool sophistication of the Alan Parsons Project. The atmosphere is more urban than occult, but the Goblin fingerprint - that particular mix of tension, melody and rhythmic insistence - remains unmistakable.
What makes this edition truly singular is the direct, hands‑on involvement of Pignatelli. Decades after the initial recording sessions, he returned to the original materials and personally remixed all four tracks on the LP, teasing out details that were previously buried in the film mix and rebalancing the sound for a dedicated listening experience rather than a cinema sound system. The low end now has a renewed physical presence, the electronic textures shimmer with greater clarity, and the dynamic contrasts feel tailored to the turntable rather than the projection booth. It is both a historical recovery and a contemporary intervention, bridging the original sessions and today’s listening standards.
The care invested in the audio is mirrored in the physical presentation. The album arrives in a brand‑new gatefold edition that treats the soundtrack as a graphic universe of its own. The cover and inner spread feature illustrations inspired by key scenes from the movie, created specially in collaboration with the Scuola Romana del Fumetto, Rome’s renowned comic book art school. Rather than simply lifting stills, the artwork translates Vanzina’s film into bold, stylized images, amplifying its mix of action, humour and street‑level grit and giving long‑time fans something genuinely new to explore.
Inside, a 60x30 cm insert turns the release into a compact archive. Writer Fabio Capuzzo provides extensive notes on the genesis of the film and its soundtrack, tracing how this oddball project came to involve Goblin at a transitional point in their career. His essay is complemented by contributions from Pignatelli himself, who illuminates the compositional and studio process, and from Enrico Vanzina, brother of the late Carlo and co‑author of the original story and screenplay. Together, these voices reconstruct the creative context around Il Ras del Quartiere, from script meetings to recording sessions, and explain how a modest action‑comedy ended up with one of the most intriguing “lost” scores in the Goblin universe.
In bringing these four tracks to vinyl for the first time, Il Ras del Quartiere does more than tick a box for completists. It reveals a band navigating the early 1980s with curiosity and flexibility, folding contemporary studio polish and electronic timbres into their already distinctive language. The result is a compact but potent slice of Goblin history, finally freed from the confines of the film and reimagined as a standalone listening experience, complete with the visual and textual depth that such a long‑awaited soundtrack deserves.
