Lacuna Coil
In A Reverie
Century Media
If there’s a band out there that would appeal to metal purists, it’s Italy’s Lacuna Coil. And if there’s a perfect goth metal album this year, In A Reverie is it.
Lacuna Coil’s trademark certainly is operatic female vocals played off a male counterpart, the band’s strength is the solid foundation of classic heavy metal. Each song seems crafted to take the dark, forbidding depths of erotic goth and mix them with solid headbanging metal. That is to say they’re obviously disciples of Black Sabbath. The music isn’t just providing a heavy background, it’s adding to Cristina Scabbia’s (who, by the way, looks like the Mona Lisa) marvelously haunting vocals, making songs like “Circle” and “My Wings” into metal odysseys.
The stand-out song is “To Myself I Turn,” which could be the best metal song of the year. It’s got awesome vocalizing, intricate, robust ups and downs and, in a word: power. The chorus of “As you see/ I’m the only survivor in this land” (the song’s about dealing with a rotten world by conquering your own fantasy world, or something like that) should be the model excellence in metal song crafting. The first part (“As you see”) is sung as one word (“Asyousee”) then there’s this crescendo of melodic heavy metal that hits like a cluster bomb leading into the rest of the line, sung as a male/female duet with chilling, yet turgid harmonies.
(Turgid harmonies? Hey, stay with me on this…) The main emphasis in the song writing is, as one would expect some sort of struggle between lovers or the world or fantasy wars in the minds of these passionate Italians. Seek this album out.
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