LACUNA COIL - Broken Crown Halo

For this writer, the case of Lacuna Coil remains a mystery, one of those cases people have tried to explain in various ways without ever finding a truly satisfying answer. You know those artists who seem to have fun mocking themselves? The kind you can sense had the potential to become truly great - maybe not the ideas to carve their name into history, but definitely the talent to be remembered with pride. And then one day they discover what it means to have a video (and in a chain reaction, more than one, digging up old ones nobody had paid attention to) on MTV, a video that happens to be for a cover (a good one) of a masterpiece. It goes to their heads and they throw everything away, including their foothold, because suddenly their songs lose warmth, intensity and power, just as metal guitars stop interesting the mainstream.

This is the short version of the Lacuna Coil story, a band that could have done any number of things: changed direction aiming perhaps for more intense territory, resisted temptation and carried on doing some of the best gothic metal ever heard in Italy, settled into a comfortable groove while keeping up the high standard of "Karmacode", or sold their souls to the charts churning out sticky hits with guitars reduced to a stereotype... Instead, none of the above. From "Shallow Life" onward we've been watching a creative, artistic, sonic and commercial suicide in progress. Because an album like the last three released under the Milanese sextet's name is one that can't possibly please anyone: flimsy melodies incapable of lodging themselves in your head, flat atmospheres that feel like homework done "because you have to", plastic arrangements a piece of software could do better, chopped-up guitars and the usual overuse of the obligatory scream.

The picture is a bleak one, and what causes even more dismay to anyone who, like this writer, has always "believed" in Cristina Scabbia and co. is the presence of a handful of ideas that prove Lacuna Coil are neither dead nor have they forgotten how to make music. Indeed, "I Forgive (But I Won't Forget You)" would have the right attitude too, if it weren't soiled by a chorus that seems stuck on just for the sake of consistency, incapable of communicating anything. And then there's the provocative "Cybersleep", which, however much it falls into pure self-quotation, could have stood out in a very different way had it not been smothered by a pointless blanket of strings. Not to mention the closing "One Cold Day", the only track that manages to save itself by the skin of its teeth, leaning on a veiled psychodrama that's mostly effect and little substance, yet somehow manages to shine as a whole.

The rest is a disaster from start to finish, well signposted by the irritating electronic whispers that introduce the obtuse opening of "Nothing Stands In Our Way" and return in the even more embarrassing "Die & Rise", a concentrate of every worst cliché around the tackiest side of pop-metal. Not to mention "Infection", which leans on the kind of sounds European teenagers were going crazy for five or six years ago, but which today find no foothold except among the minority who "like metal" - the easy kind, that is. "Zombies", "Victims" and "I Burn In You" could be the exact same song performed with different guitar effects, with lyrics and vocal parts respectively altered and swapped around. The same goes for "Hostage To The Life" and "In The End I Feel Alive", once again driven by soulless synthetic punctuation.

Watching a band you've loved (and deep down still love) hurt itself is a disappointment that goes beyond the strictly professional sphere, already often hard to separate from the personal and passionate one. Witnessing all this without even the meagre consolation of commercial returns that might "satisfy" them as human beings makes it all the more frustrating. And after three albums on the same wavelength, the hope of a late comeback looks more and more like sheer utopia.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

05/05/2014