Faith & The Muse

It's strange when a concert you've long dreamed of seeing manages to unsettle and move you even more than expected, all because of a banal technical mishap. That's what happened on the night of September 21st at the Init Club, a small but atmospheric venue where much of the capital's not-exactly-huge but proud "goth" crowd gathered to witness a true institution of gothic rock from the last decade: the band led by guitarist and singer William Faith (a legend of the genre thanks to his stints in the "second-era" Christian Death of Rozz Williams and in Shadow Project, another wonderful project launched by the sorely missed Rozz) and his "muse", vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Monica Richards, joined for the occasion by their full band (Matt Howden — violin and guitar; Cynthia Coulter — bass; Chad Blinman — drums).

According to pre-show buzz, the concert was expected to lean more towards the upbeat, danceable death-rock of their latest album "The Burning Season" rather than the gothic-medieval atmospheres in the vein of Dead Can Dance, to which the band had often shown great devotion in past work. But the technical snag mentioned earlier — a simple fault in the amplification system — made using electric instrumentation problematic, if not virtually impossible. So what to do? Cancel the long-awaited show, or improvise a semi-unplugged set? Luckily for everyone present, the second option was chosen. So, while the Italian sextet Morgana's Kiss — one of the countless goth bands stirring within Italy's musical underground, which nonetheless offers them very few chances to break through — served as the opening act with well-played and well-sung songs (even if the singer, talented as she was, perhaps "siouxsieed it up" a bit too much, while the backing vocalist, more of a visual presence than anything else, limited herself to murmuring under her breath), none of which left any lasting mark on the memory, the long wait and the long delay on the setlist finally came to an end. William Faith — puffy-faced and sly — and Monica Richards — magnetic and gorgeous — made their entrance on stage.

In an ebb and flow of semi-acoustic arrangements put together in almost no time at all (and the songs from the new album, in particular, were nearly impossible to picture played with such fragile, delicate sonorities), accompanied — on many, though not all, of the songs — by their bandmates (special mention goes to multi-instrumentalist Matt Howden, precise and elegant in his violin and guitar flourishes alike), Faith and Richards worked their way back through the best of their career, gradually growing more comfortable with the unexpected situation they'd been forced to play in, until the pleasure they themselves were taking from it became unmistakably clear.

The longer the concert went on, the more the distance between the audience and the band all but disappeared; the atmosphere grew so intimate, so hushed, so rarefied that by the end of the show (which Faith closed with great class, tackling a long and intense cover of the Chamaleons) the whole crowd was left almost dazed, disbelieving. An hour and a half had gone by, but it felt like five minutes: the concert slipped away in one breath, with unsettling naturalness. And Rome's "few but devoted" goth crowd will remember it for a long time.

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