Lacuna Coil - Dark Adrenaline review

Year : 2011
Genre : Alternative Metal Gothic
Label : Century Media
Origin : Italy
Rating : 8.0 / 10

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Lacuna Coil attempts to bring the energy of Rammstein to channel the music of Kidney Thieves, and, as soon as someone attempts to do so, it deserves immediate attention. The key-, minor deficits of the current formation are quick to reveal themselves, as are the beneficiary soul contents and other goodies the squad is able to deliver. The best potentiality of the record lies in its honest-, nevertheless elegant bubblegum character : the structures hardly-, if ever deviate from the standard compositional technique of verse-chorus, verse, breakdown, biiiigbig chorus, yet, as long as the served elements are able to please your receivers, this template is still quite efficient. The album's most favored song length of 3 minutes - only two of 12 pieces topple this length - seems to solidify the impression that the prime agenda herein is to deliver a hefty, easily accessible Goth soulride for the whole family, your secret latex gimp in the closet, - HA! - included. Read on to find out more about this slick release.


Dark Adrenaline shows capacity to exhibit a diverse set of moods, fortunately. Opening track "Trip the Darkness" has a pronounced leaning towards a dangerous, sanely limited fairy tale register, while "Fire" - much later - is a cybernetic soulhack inviting you to rebel without a pause. The hooks are coming your way in the forms of the choruses, primarily, and they bow to no boundaries regarding the tools and sets of moods they seek to utilize to administer steady entertainment. As for the moods, a good portion of this release sounds as traditional alternative - oops! - metal to me, and, to be honest, it is great to hear an LP that does not take its Gothic sentiments to the perplexedly extremely serious. The content herein has dignity, and a good amount of hooks.

Now for the good old fashioned beating. The absence of a Free Dominguez and an Animal like Corey Taylor is regretful, as the fronters herein - one female, one man - are giving acceptable and mediocre vocal performances, respectively. Their accent is tolerable, even cute at times, yet I not always am content with the "emotional" renditions they are portraying. The male fronter has only one favorite style of singing, and that is the bluesy rasp you already had the chance to bore yourself to hell and back with, while the female singer has a more diverse set of singing rhetorics. At track 11, "Fire", the chick fronter starts out the fray in comic book Free Dominguez fashion, and must say, she does quite a decent job at that. Yet, this rabid kind of borderline intensity is a rare invitee of the release, as Dark Adrenaline has a more tame character as its prime attribute, instead of angst. This, of course, is not a blemish, rather a probable heartfelt decision of the band, and, as such, this factor should not be subjected to criticism. On occasion, Lacuna Coil is able to reveal superb mid-tempo harmonic environments, like the chorus of track 7 "I don't believe in tomorrow" : this hook reeks Slipknot's "Sulfur" without ripping it off, so : Kudos!

Lacuna Coil's Dark Adrenaline is a solid offering all in the spirit of Italian gothcybermetal, yet, with a more pronounced spiritual leaning towards the peaceful than this particular Italian beauty. Lacuna Coil's latest weighs in as a serious addition to the first month of this particular year, and, the fact that it is largely free of gloom, appeals to me greatly. A safe, immediate recommendation and I like it.

Rating : 8.0 / 10

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To Die For - Samsara review

Year : 2011
Genre : Gothic Metal with a Groove Metal temper
Label : Independent
Origin : Finland
Rating : 6.9 / 10

Finland's To Die For is barging to your private world with quite a well established set of basic intents, and there is not much if any dangers - nor radical affections - ahead to deviate along from the primer directions this release is hasty and enthusiastic to reveal right from its efficient beginning.

"Kissing the Flames" is a superstrong album opener with an accessible nature that shows subtlety in its coarse-, but very meticulously realized elements of pure brute muscle charm. The song has a variety of well defined meat hooks laid strategically in its fabric, and the primordial agenda to deliver the furious Goth rant with a groooooove! fucking met'lllllllll! temper, works in a sanely calculated fashion that serves the plan steadily, without endangering your awareness levels towards any direction whatsoever. If you want, read on to find out about the other tracks, too, but don't forget your coffee.


Track number 2, "Damned Rapture" is a convoluted mid tempo build with a hint of a middle eastern tone surfacing up in it from time to time. The song is an efficient initial mixture of the family friendly form of Metallica and Muse, as the song's verse structure truly is a soulful and inventive flow with top notch harmonic structure, and only the drunk football fan chorus takes away from it. Other than that, nice contribution with an equal tendency to slowly groove-, AND "sludge" it out. The climax of the song has a more intense rumbling going on, but nothing too serious, as it is not given the route to thrash anything along.

"Cry for Love" sports a great romantic punk chorus - yes, turns out there IS such a thing, ask Sid Vicious. This is a song greatly inspired by Billy Idol's White Wedding, have no doubt about it. This song has a sexy grasp on the ears with solid 4/4 pummeling and decent riffcraft, making way to the aforementioned punk romance chorus with great anticipation factor. This peak sequence, in my opinion, is pretty efficient and integral for its character, and seems to solidify the presumption that, once a band has legit ideas (to steal), the "standard" methods to make it heavy, are more than sufficient to pull off a tremendous job. This traditionally instrumentalized song brings everything you could ever hope for from a goth punk romantic song. Goof heft, tremendous charisma. "GOOF???" Sorry. Tpyo.

"Death Comes in March" sounds to be a very personal delivery with the usual "that was my meaningless life laaaalala" delusion that always is the easiest way to suffer along with very mild spiritual efforts needed. The song's anatomy, frighteningly enough - for me myself and I - brings to this mind the character of a U2 song, and U2 always was the stinky gym sock of music in my world, including Bono's terribly undignified singing, rivaled - granted : surpassed - only by the merciless James LaBrie.

"Folie a Delux" is a slow-tempo Epic with a nice instrumental section checking in - for 5 seconds - at the middle, and, though this segment sounds to have a superb Blade Runner vibe to it, the main character of the song leans towards relentless-, and  decently constructed melancholy, my only qualm is the female choir, that gets utilized as a method to offer relevant content, but registers as everyday average streetside attraction at best, and a snob does not even take a peek at a streetside attraction, sorry, Ladies.

"Hail of Bullets" is sweaty as an obese old fart ironbar-bender in a circus, and, though it garners the last remaining drop of cheap intensity from the pond of toy-thrills with a desperate attempt to make itself passable during the chorus, its good galore of unfortunate traits - like a pinball machine soundtrack structure, pop festival synthetisers and your mom in hair rolls - make this song a pretty entertaining bad song. Think of the timeless classic Beat It from Michael Jackson, only without a true idea/plan behind it beyond the intent to reflect on its own nature as a heartwrenchingly blotched attempt to clone itself.

"Love's a Sickness" is another mid-tempo build with - in my opinion - disorganized, scattered segments, made out of straightforward-, risk-free verse structures and shallow instrumental interludes that reek the drunk-ass "gotta score a cougar" mood of a German beer festival where everyone is so fucking drunk than you need to be too to endure at the very least. This song has a respectable intent to save some of the day with interesting groove metal riffing kicking in at the climax, yet Pantera's T-Rex does not care to save too much of THIS day, it takes a piss, yawns and moves its ass to a more interesting place to devastate.

"Raving Hearts" is your favorite Goth boyscout song, that, in character, seeks to show similarities with the strong album opener, yet a row of relevant blemishes - like an incompetent guitar solo - bogs it down steadily. No wonder the "solo" - synonym : guitar strangling - gets interrupted by an out-of-nowhere ambient drone section, and, it is no use that the song seeks to go Silent Hill atmospherics on your hide, the track does not get a stable checkpoint, regardless of an acceptable chorus.

"Oblivion : Vision" is a perplexing, in my opinion, quite enervated slow tempo build with singing that becomes more and more that of a dying pedophile with AIDS and the flu, check the vocal delivery from 5:14, what the fuck!!? This song is somewhat of a mistake, in my opinion, but a big of it at least.

"Someday Somewhere Somehow", fortunately enough, is a decent album wrapper with a tight chorus that brings to mind the stunning peak moment of the opening track of fellow Finnish act Rainroom's latest. This song has a solid set of well balanced behaviors of intensity it chooses to exhibit, and packs particularly nice sonic modulations of great surprise power from time to time. I totally like how it goes for werewolfish psychedelic classic in a blink of an eye, and the whole thing is very sexy, fresh and strong. If this would have been the form brought by this album all the way, then I would give 9.0 or even above without hesitation. Here is one super-consistent record from Finland. But this is not the case, as this To Die For album, in my opinion, is not consistent, and has a fair share of uninspired moments. Still a likable record, but there are a lot of regions on it to not kiss instead.

Rating : 6.9 / 10

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