Goblin at Òran Mór: how The Skinny's Bram E. Gieben heard a Glasgow show in 2014

In 2014 Claudio Simonetti's Goblin played Òran Mór in Glasgow, a venue better known for theatre and music in the West End than for horror-soundtrack nights. The band, built around the synthesiser work Simonetti did for Italian genre films of the 1970s and 1980s, had by then become a fixture on the live circuit, reviving the music that made them known to a new audience. It was against this backdrop that The Skinny sent Bram E. Gieben to cover the show, and his review appeared on 5 March 2014.

What Gieben responded to most strongly was the range of the performance. Rather than treating the material as nostalgia, he described a set that moved with ease between atmospheric synthesiser passages and heavier funk-metal riffs. The shift between those two registers, he suggested, was handled smoothly enough that the transitions felt like part of the same argument rather than a jolt from one style to another.

The verdict itself is what makes the piece stand out. Gieben called the performance astounding and was clear that he thought it was an outstanding night. He also took aim at a word often reached for when discussing this band. Describing Goblin as seminal, he implied, was not quite enough, because the word fails to capture how the group actually sounds and how much it still matters in the room.

Some of the most vivid detail in the review concerns Simonetti himself. Gieben noted that he was playing five synthesizers at once, a physical and musical feat that underlined how central keyboard texture was to the band's identity. In a live setting that approach gives the synth lines weight and movement that recordings can only suggest, and the review treats that visible effort as part of the show's pull.

Looking back, the review is a useful snapshot of how Goblin were being received on stage in the mid-2010s: not as curators of a back catalogue, but as a live band with real force. The Skinny's coverage captures a critic who came away convinced the group deserved more than a polite footnote, and whose own language was pushed past the usual superlatives to make the point.