I've been raving about the recent Frizzi reissues that have been coming out on vinyl lately, like the gorgeous re-mastered Lp editions of Zombi 2 and City of The Living Dead, which all offer an opportunity for a much needed re-appraisal of the Italian composer's work. With Mondo's reissue of Frizzi's soundtrack to the 1990 film A Cat In The Brain, though, we're treated to one of his lesser known, more offbeat film scores that shows a different side to his style. Appearing here on vinyl for the first time ever, Frizzi's Cat In The Brain was another in a long line of collaborations between Frizzi and legendary Italian splat-master Lucio Fulci, but for this project the composer offered an oddball mix of romantic synth music along with his signature throbbing electro-funk terror and sinister ambience, several of the tracks sourced from previous Fulci-film soundtracks, which served as the backdrop to Fulci's meta examination of his career that was the basis of the film. Cat was definitely one of the more unusual and thoughtful films in Fulci's body of work from the late 80s, featuring a narrative that saw Fulci essentially playing himself as an aging horror film director questioning his ever-tenuous grip on reality amidst a series of violent murders. It was an intriguing diversion from the sort of hyper-violent horrors that made Fulci famous in the earlier part of the decade, though Cat has its share of seriously moist gore sequences. And the soundtrack was likewise a bit different from the classic synth-drenched Frizzi scores of the early 80's with its heavy jazz and pop influence, but you'll still find that signature sonic sickness that we love from this guy, along with a few traces of the gothic progginess that made earlier scores like City and Zombi 2 some of my favorite Italian horror scores of all time.

     Frizzi's Cat In The Brain mirrors the psychological disarray of it's protagonist as it moves erratically from disturbing atonal jazziness laced with screaming hard rock guitar solos and those signature dissonant piano chords, into saccharine late-80's instrumental casio-pop draped in sickeningly sweet romantic synth-strings, a weird casio-flute rendition of the melody from Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, passages of smoky ragtime, arrangements for ghostly music box melody and creepy children's songs, and a couple of awesomely vintage action-synth themes scattered among the score's spookier synthscapes and twisted dark funk. There's also a reworked version of Frizzi's classic "Voci Dal Nulla" theme from The Beyond that ties in with Cat's meta musings on the state of the creative mind and a directors relationship to cinematic violence.

     While it would have been nice to have the original Un gatto nel cervello poster art for the sleeve, the artwork from We Buy Your Kids is one of the better designs I've seen from them. Packaged in a gatefold jacket, the reissue is rounded out with new liner notes from Frizzi, and is pressed on one hundred eighty gram vinyl.