Gotham
Neil Morris Fragrances (2008)

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

I get a sharp, peppery opening underpinned by a salty leather, with just a whiff of the fruity note listed as yuzu. An inky narcissus begins to bloom thirty minutes in, & after an hour a beautiful rose, making this much more intensely floral than I expected. Three hours in, there's a softly animalic element, & later on I distinctly smell sandalwood, although it's not listed. I don't get any amber/labdanum, but it's still going softly after eight hours.

With a name like "Gotham", I thought this would have a much darker, almost menacing feel, & be somehow more traditionally masculine. But far from suggesting "bat cave" to me, it's more of an English country garden, filled with rambling roses & crammed with narcissi. And all the more lovely for it.

Peppery, yuzu fruit on top. Dark, almost woody rose and narcissus notes in the middle. A kind of roasted, honeyed sweetness exposes itself a bit later. Smoldering amber, myrrh, and labdanum. Old leather smell.
A windless evening in late autumn. The coziness of an indoor fire. The feel, of the excitement of a new love, in its early stages. A very evocative perfume.

Thus far, the best fragrance I found in the Neil Morris' range. A leathery / ambery oriental with chyprey/musky facets. It could easily be one of those *french* animalic florals from the 80s. Dark, velvety and kind of gothic too yet not particularly distinctive...

Nice though...

A complicated and involved fragrance that hovers somewhere between classic perfumery and the present. Up front is a lightly peppered citrus that recalls masculine aromatics, but it's paired with a leather and something that reminds me of cardboard (not norlimbanol). These notes converge into a rich, leathery amber that's warm and evocative, yet also quite dark and moody, calling up images of the underbelly of high society. It does smell a tad home-spun, I suppose, but that's generally a positive thing in my book as it tends to infer the breaking of rules. Gotham stands alone, perfectly reflecting the city of its namesake in which one can be surrounded by millions of people yet remain totally anonymous.

Finally i've tried this mysterious fragrance whose the evocative  name, the colour of the juice, the aroused aura and relative reviews were thrilling me by months. Gotham exudes the arcane, camphoraceous, sinister smell of a late afternoon in an old medieval town. The general atmosphere is gothic even if oddly  contemporary. The darkness is not obscurity in here but the shadow of an overcast sky. The smell is very intense, leathery, rosey and woodsy (i would say better that i detect some similarities with the smell of some mold, mushrooms, truffles or anyway with the smell of umid, stuffy, claustrophobic, mildewed subterraneous cellars). I don't detect black pepper or better i smell some spiciness and saltiness but not the initial pungency of pepper. I agree who with writes about indolic floral smell from the duo rose-narcissus. I detect in the dry down that sort of smouldering incensey-boise' kind of smell proper of the chord of strong amber, olibanum, labdanum, musk and leather. On this sphere i notice a certain similarity with the Mazzolari fragrances which anyway use to be  more smouldering and brewing than Gotham. A very well made creation, with excellent projection and longevity, with averagely natural ingredients and with a captivating strange "vintage-modern" temperament.