Lacuna Coil
Delirium
Century Media
2016
Lacuna Coil that started out as a goth metal band have during the past four or so albums, transformed into a rather generic America-friendly “core”-inspired band, with their female singer, Cristina Scabbia, progressively sidelined to an almost completely harmonized ornament for the choruses. They have quite shamelessly projected her as a focal point, but as she grows older, she’s probably wisely sidelined, fading into the increasingly homogenized modernist sound that bears little semblance to the band that started it all.
They still have an edge and a parchment for writing the occasional decent pop tune, for instance the title track, which features Scabbia more prominently, is not bad, with its Indian/eastern influenced samples diversifying it enough from the likes of the generic dross that has Ferro singing boringly all over. The semi-post-balladry of “Downfall” is OK, but Ferro again ruins much of it by rapping all over it. Mysteriously the band even decides to invest into a solo on this one… weird. They even choose to repeat that… there are the occasional moments on the album like “Ghost in the Mist”, “Live to Tell” and the seriously heavier “Breakdown”, which sort of works better than half of the other material on the album, but the “graduation” of the band in order to be more compatible with the US market has deprived them of their identity and bestowed upon them a brand of generic likeness, with the same regurgitated down tuned riffs not being able to create enough interesting or different sounding tunes.
The transition of the band from a “The Gathering” inspired one to a Linkin Park/Evanescence/Insert boring metalcore band here may have granted them with big sales in America, but there’s hardly anything interesting anymore… apart from Scabbia’s vocals that sound strained and overproduced and the occasional good melody here and there but, really turn to yourselves before you completely lose every last ounce of what really made you.
They still have an edge and a parchment for writing the occasional decent pop tune, for instance the title track, which features Scabbia more prominently, is not bad, with its Indian/eastern influenced samples diversifying it enough from the likes of the generic dross that has Ferro singing boringly all over. The semi-post-balladry of “Downfall” is OK, but Ferro again ruins much of it by rapping all over it. Mysteriously the band even decides to invest into a solo on this one… weird. They even choose to repeat that… there are the occasional moments on the album like “Ghost in the Mist”, “Live to Tell” and the seriously heavier “Breakdown”, which sort of works better than half of the other material on the album, but the “graduation” of the band in order to be more compatible with the US market has deprived them of their identity and bestowed upon them a brand of generic likeness, with the same regurgitated down tuned riffs not being able to create enough interesting or different sounding tunes.
The transition of the band from a “The Gathering” inspired one to a Linkin Park/Evanescence/Insert boring metalcore band here may have granted them with big sales in America, but there’s hardly anything interesting anymore… apart from Scabbia’s vocals that sound strained and overproduced and the occasional good melody here and there but, really turn to yourselves before you completely lose every last ounce of what really made you.