ExpiatoriA / Il Segno del Comando — Voci Notturne Review

Act I — The Whispering of Night Voices

From the moment the listener presses play, they are ushered into a collaborative haunting between ExpiatoriA and Il Segno Del Comando. This is more than a split release or a standard album—it is a cohesive narrative, a story told in shadows.

As ExpiatoriA explains: Voci Notturne (Night Voices) is a 1995 Italian miniseries by Pupi Avati that has gained cult status among mystery and occult fans.

The story begins with a body found in the Tiber, Rome’s river, possibly belonging to Giacomo Fiorenza, son of a wealthy industrialist, though its identity and cause of death remain uncertain. The corpse bears strange signs: bound hands, ritual circumcision, garum smeared on the skin, and silphium seeds in the stomach.

Act II — Emily’s Apparition

The story opens with Emily—not merely a character, but a presence that suggests a gradual, unsettling unveiling. Whether a séance, a distant recollection, or an epic haunting, she ushers the listener into an eight-minute Gothic blackened-doom soundscape. It sits somewhere between the operatic weight of Candlemass, the theatrical horror of Death SS, and the macabre storytelling of King Diamond.

As the hymn progresses, the tension builds through clean, progressive arpeggios drenched in reverb, gradually thickening into massive, doom-laden chords. The percussion maintains a ceremonial pace—tom-heavy and heartbeat-like—while the synths provide a backdrop of choir pads and Mellotron-style textures, wrapping Emily in a truly spectral aura.

At the centre of this gloom is the vocal performance: a narrative baritone or mezzo-soprano, delivered half-spoken and half-sung. It is the voice of someone desperately recalling a memory they fear is real, grounding the supernatural atmosphere in a very human sense of dread.

Act III — The Crossing of the Sublicius

The narrative follows suit with the succeeding hymn, Sublicius, named after the Pons Sublicius—the ancient Roman wooden bridge synonymous with omens, rituals, and crossings. 

This movement feels like a deliberate ritual transition; the exact moment the mundane world is left behind for the sacred and the strange.

The guitars shift into a more rhythmic focus, utilising palm-muted chugging to evoke the steady, heavy thud of footsteps on ancient wood. Complementing this is a drum performance that adopts a disciplined, almost military march, echoing the Roman symbolism at the heart of the hymn.

While the synths settle into subtle, atmospheric drones—reminiscent of the thick fog rolling under the bridge—the vocals become more declarative. Here, the narrator sounds as if they are documenting the crossing in real time, grounding the listener in the physical act of the journey.

Act IV — The Lament of Lady Valover

A second portrait emerges, but this one is aristocratic, tragic, and steeped in the weight of old secrets. Moving into the third hymn, La Canzone di Lady Valover, we encounter an eight-minute opus that opens with the sombre hum of strings. These melodies carry distinct Mediterranean and neoclassical inflections—dark, moving, and deeply rooted in a sense of place.

As the vocals emerge from the darkness, they are calmer and delivered in the band’s native tongue or spoken in Latin. Lyrical, expressive, and inherently theatrical, Lady Valover’s song feels less like a haunting and more like a final confession.

The instrumentation breathes with despair; the percussion is defined by ornate cymbal flourishes and dramatic rolls that underscore the song’s mourning, while the piano adds a haunting, elegant aura to the arrangement. 

Where Emily is a ghost, Lady Valover is a history—the music grants her lineage, gravity, and a tragic, enduring weight.

Act V — The Two Paths of Fate

The narrative now shifts to Il Segno Del Comando—the esoteric fork in the road where the investigator must choose. In the fourth hymn, Le Due Vie(The Two Paths), the listener is greeted by dual guitar lines and harmonised riffs that fruitfully represent these diverging fates.

Unlike the slow, ceremonial pace of the previous movements, the drumshere feel urgent, providing the first real sense of forward momentum in the story. Suspenseful synth motifs—sharp, minor-key arpeggios—flicker through the arrangement like shadows cast by a flickering torch.

The vocals are intense and almost admonishing; they are the voice of a guide who has seen the end of both roads. The music perfectly embodies the tension of an impossible choice—the heavy, palpable sense that while one path leads to revelation, the other leads only to ruin.