Dark Adrenaline

Lacuna Coil tough journey

Now that it is so easy to encounter another expensive fascinating and stylish video from Italian Lacuna Coil band or come across the easily recognizable chorus of their new hit on the radio, it might seem that this ensemble surfaced from out of nowhere and in a blink of an eye became mega popular. Yet how mistaken this thought is! Lacuna Coil did not win any of those big TV music shows, nor are they pink-cheeked wunderkinds who turned into stars over a day, a week or a month. This band was no conjuror when, in the late nineties, it began invading the gothic metal scene, where it was already too crowded. Before having their own face and establishing their own sound, the ensemble endured a storm of criticism and hurricane of indignation. Every second person saw in the Italians impudent and helpless amateurs who chose the beaten tracks, wrote stolen melodies and played trite hooks. Starting from the deep underground, walking a long way, Lacuna Coil, eventually reached out for the lights and today they are the ones others are compared with and they teach others to play top level hard rock.

Gothic is done with

By the release of Lacuna Coil sixth long player titled Dark Adrenaline, the band’s style ultimately lost the features of classic gothic metal with its dragging guitars, dreary keys and vampire chronicles in the lyrics. As a matter of fact, the only thing reminding of this genre in the female singing that has not changed much in the last fifteen years, and the image of the members. The male scream or growling, a trademark of their early art, is not a part of Lacuna Coil anymore. Dark Adrenaline is closest to alternative rock with preserved grit of riffs, might of drums and vocal intensity. In the meantime, the ensemble fully relies on the traditional pop-format structure of verse and chorus with growing loudness. These not so sophisticated tricks, supplied with the three-minute length of almost all the tracks here, make sure you remember these easy tunes quickly and recognize the song after the first chords. What brings a little insight into the band’s original style is the album opener Trip The Darkness. The rest of the record is nu-metal in American manner with exquisite production. Indeed, sound delivery is where the difference between Dark Adrenaline and the predecessor, Shallow Life (2009), lies, because in terms of music the CDs are nearly identical.

The genre does not matter, but the way it sounds does

As usual, Lacuna Coil’s middle class of the instrumental parts is compensated with the unsurpassed female singer Christina Scabbia, who merges in her manner the mystique obscurity, the harshness and even the hysterical touches. Choruses with her integral performances are the record’s main attraction, particularly in songs Fire, Intoxicated, and Upside Down. With Christina in action, the work of the male second singer, Andrea Ferro, seems but weak and sometimes even extra. It is really not easy for the listener to distract himself from the lady’s voice to anything else in Lacuna Coil’s music, although the musicians do their best to correct this inequity. In Against You you will find one rock music element that is not very common for the band, an actual guitar solo, albeit far from very complex. To make the album more diverse and more like a true classic rock effort,, the Italians added to the list a couple of ballads, End Of Time, and My Spirit, and they do not feel like hollow fillers at all. In general, Dark Adrenaline has everything a quality rock CD is supposed to have to please a wide audience. We know that masses do not really care what a band used to play and how unique their music is. What matters is that Lacuna Coil’s new album is pleasurable listen for more than one time.