Man, there ain't nothin' like hearing some cool Caribbean grooves while a rotting corpse is ripping your intestines out and eating you alive like a human charcuterie board.

Pricey but eye-popping new reissues from Italian label Beat Records for the classic Fulci gorefest score from Fabio Frizzi. The "main" part of this score had been reissued on vinyl by Death Waltz a while back, but that version only featured the first eight "sequences" from the original score; this disc adds on the song "There Is No Matter" and another four "sequences" from Frizzi's score. This newe CD edition is posh as fuck, presenting the disc in a cool slimline case and paired with a glossy forty-page perfect-bound book that has an assortment of liner notes in both Italian and English from Antonella Fulci, Daniele De Gemini, and Fabio Frizzi himself. The rest of the book is filled with stills from the film, featuring some of the most iconic and chunkblowing scenes from this splatter masterpiece. Both the CD and booklet are housed in a typically gorgeous-looking slipcase. That price tag stings, but man does it look and sound like a million bucks. Topped off by new artwork from both Alexandros Pyromallis and Graham Humphreys.

I'm usually allergic to tropical flavors, but man, when Frizzi drops this soundtrack, It's pina colada time. Smooth tropicalia with the steel drums, light keyboard melody and sinuous bass line all groovin' , bring on the fun! It's insidious how playful those tracks sound. And then it all shifts into the darkside when cuts like "Zombi 2 (Seq.2)" come in, delivering that classic menacing pulse and airy, floaty synth beds. That dichotomy that Frizzi berings tio the Zombi experience is as important to the effectiveness of Fucli's film as the gore and action sequences, as far as I'm concerned. And it's straight-up beautiful at times, which makes everything all the more perverse. Here's my old write-up on this score from a previous Death Waltz edition:

One of my all-time favorite Italian composers from the Golden Age of pastaland splatter, Fabio Frizzi assembled one of the most iconic film scores from this era with his hallucinatory score for Lucio Fulci's 1979 undead splatter classic Zombie Flesh Eaters. The film itself is a classic of Italian horror, in spite of it's obvious cribbing of ideas from George Romero's work; the story is prone to all of the nonsensical plotting and lapses in logic that infect much of Fulci's horror output, but there are images in Zombi 2 that are among some of the most indelible visions of flesh-carnage on record. The infamous "splinter" sequence alone elevated this into some upper echelon of filmic carnography. For the soundtrack to Fulci's blood-splattered, verdant-green nightmare, Frizzi crafted a dreamlike assemblage of island music, primitive droning synthesizers, and eerie Mellotrons floating in a putrescent haze of rot and decay. If you were to stumble across this Lp blindly, hearing Frizzi's opening sequence of Caribbean percussion, steel drums, and sunny island melodies would hardly suggest the imminent descent into Fulci's nightmarish world of black voodoo magic, violent jungle death and shambling rot contained on these reels; the first track on the Zombi 2 soundtrack sounds more like the theme music for an island getaway resort commercial, but this strange intro only serves to make the sinister synthscapes, Mellotron-laced prog and glistening early 80's horror ambience that follows all the more haunting.

This is some of Frizzi's best known work, a classic spook-prog soundtrack and a solid album of malevolent synthesizer music all on its own, enhanced by collaborator Maurizio Guarini who handled the keyboard work. Some of those traces of musical tropicalia continue to appear throughout the score, subtle percussive elements suggestive of steel drums that are carefully sublimated beneath the sleek synths and propulsive rhythms, and the feverish trancelike sound of tribal drums are a recurring theme, evoking the themes of voodoo magic and undead chaos that creep through Fulci's film, imbuing the island chaos with urgency and unease. There's also a smattering of wailing atonal acid guitar and some subtle Moroder-esque disco elements, all wrapped in Frizzi's mutant electronic sounds. And then there's that main theme, ah that main theme for the film, mournful and strange and mesmeric, those muted muffled drum machines thumping beneath the choral voices buried beneath all that murk, the sound ancient and moldering, only to birth that main synth hook that any fan of Italian splatter will instantly recognize. It's right up there with Goblin's output from the same period, eerie and weird and totally unforgettable, the whole soundtrack imbued with a feeling of wrongness that's impossible to shake.

The additional tracks are manna for fans of the original score, nine through thirteen offering up a goldmine of Italian sleaze-sheen; again, these were not available on the previous Death Waltz vinyl edition from awhile back. First there is that killer disco track "There Is No Matter", a total anthem for the disaffected that turns into a sax-smeared earworm. Composed by the trio of Fabio Frizzi, Vincenzo Tempera, and Franco Bixio, this tune is uncut 1979 dance floor euphoria. The bass guitar dominates with a wicked funk groove, and those icy female vocals are just perfect. From there, you get four more "sequences", "Seq. 9" to "Seq. 12", that pull you through tangles of eerie synthesizer drift and voodoo-influenced percussion, weird noise collages and mangled voices buried under a mile of grave-dirt, ominous abstract dronescapes, bizarre disco-flecked filth and nauseating electronic effects, brief bits of quasi-Goblinoid progginess, sickly jazz horns, swirling clouds of experimental synth and shimmering metallic tones, these sounds reverberating around each other to produce more than ten minutes of deeply unsettling and unearthly ambience. These four tracks are easily the most experimental and abstract pieces from the soundtrack, sometimes evocative of older musique concrete compositions or especially warped mutations of kosmische electronics. Frizzi has never been shy about incorporating his more "avant-garde" tendencies in his film work, but this is the first time I've heard all of this featured on CD/vinyl.

As far as this new CD edition goes, the sound is exquisite on this format. This might be the best audio presentation of Frizzi's score, especially with the more than ten minutes of bonus material, but I'm not doing a side-by-side comparison. The clarity and depth of the mix just sounds fantastic.

The LP version features the exact same track listing, with the single 12" record housed in a printed inner sleeve with liner notes in both English and Italian along with a spectacular exclusive black and white cover and some killer full-color art/images from the film.