In metal and punk, there’s a shorthand for describing bands who model their sound on known genre benchmarks — if a band sounds like pre-Heartwork Carcass, you can call them “Carcass worship” and plenty of people will know what you mean. Bands who use the famous Discharge beat play d-beat, though “Discharge worship” is a style in its own right. And so on.

I became interested in Pittsburgh’s Zombi when I heard them described as a Goblin worship band. There’s more to it than that, of course, but I want to start there, because Goblin’s soundtracks for Romero and Argento movies hold a permanent place in my heart. In the early 2000’s, there weren’t many bands writing lost-giallo-soundtrack music — there are more now — and Zombi’s pastiche approach to composition fascinated me. Their Relapse Records debut, Cosmos, came charging out of the gate with its central influence on its sleeve, unmistakable to the already-initiated. No horror fiend could hear it without experiencing a profoundly dislocating sense of having been here before — but not here, exactly: rather, somewhere like here. That’s the spindle around which Steve Moore & Anthony Paterra have, over the past twenty years, wound threads of near-infinite variety. To describe what their work feels when you hear it requires us to venture a little out into the theoretical weeds.