Rock Music Critic
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Lacuna Coil – Dark Adrenaline
Today we have a band that needs no introduction, Lacuna Coil. “Dark Adrenaline” is the Italian gothic metal band’s sixth album. It should come as no surprise that the album sounds great; Lacuna Coil’s track record for quality work is well established. I was, however, surprised and pleased to see they do a cover of R.E.M.s “Losing My Religion.” Previously, on “Karmacode”, they covered Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” I enjoy hearing old pop and rock songs redone proper by metal bands.
One thing I’ve been curious about is that Andrea Ferro does a hell of a lot of singing in the band, yet I only ever hear about Cristina Scabbia when people talk about Lacuna Coil. I guess that’s because Cristina is ridiculously hot and both the media and the fans like to focus on her. But damn, the dude has got some great pipes. Before I really ever paid much attention to Lacuna Coil I thought Cristina was the main and only singer; once I started listening I was like “oh, who is this guy that is singing all over the place?” I really enjoy that there are male and female clean vocals and that rather than one or the other doing just back-up they both sing lead.
In case you are in the minority of metal fans who aren’t familiar with Lacuna Coil, and you are wondering what you’ll get with this album, let me give you a little info. The music is fairly heavy and grandiose in a melodic gothic way. It’s heavier than your run-of-the-mill Evanescence clones and, as I’ve pointed out, has plenty of clean dude vox as well. The songs are huge and sound like they fill every crack and corner of the room with their presence. There’s a good punch to the mix but not in an overly bass-heavy way; they are just really dense. And if you like melodic catchy songs you are in for a treat.
By this point you are reading this and either totally psyched for the new Lacuna Coil album or throwing up in your mouth a little at the blatant commercialism and wishing I would write about something like Dodecahedron or the upcoming Psycroptic album. Yeah, metal covers a great deal of sonic ground. I seriously doubt there is any metal band out there that is beloved by all metal fans; we’ve always got some gripe about somebody. I do it too, but I like to think I have a very wide scope of acceptance for different genres of metal. I’m going through more of an extreme metal phase at the moment (doom was my last phase) but I can still sit back and enjoy a great album like “Dark Adrenaline” any day of the week.
Fist to the Sky – Down Into Hell
My rule here on RMC is that if you are going to send me material there should be at least three songs. But rules are made to be broken right? And since it is my own rule I had no qualms about breaking it when Fist to the Sky asked me to review their two-song single “Down into Hell.”
Fist to the Sky are an unsigned band out of Chicago and I’m guessing “Down into Hell” is the leading edge of what will eventually be their second album. Their first self-released album was 2010’s “Light the World Up.” Since I only have two songs to check out on this single I looked up some tracks from the first album on YouTube to get a basis for comparison. What a difference a year makes! The songs from “Light the World Up” while good (not quite as “metal” as these two songs, but still very interesting) really emphasize how the production quality definitely went up a couple notches for the single.
How to classify Fist to the Sky in the metal genus? The music is well crafted melodic metal and the vocals are mostly clean and melodic with the occasional harsh edge. The whole thing gives me the impression of old and new. Musically you don’t hear a lot of metal like this these days, except maybe in the prog metal category, but this doesn’t feel prog. It sometimes has more of an old school pre-grunge fingerprint to it. The vocals, though, are definitely more in the here and now, particularly the harsh edged ones. Most of the clean vocals in metal today I associate with mall metal bands for teens like Bullet for My Valentine. Bands like that sound very formulaic and forced to me like they want to be heavy but want to get on the radio too. Fist to the Sky don’t fall into that category of melodic sounding metal either; I get the impression these guys do what they do the way they do it because that is what they enjoy. Hang on to that; don’t let anybody force you into a product mold.
I very much enjoy what I’m hearing from Fist to the Sky. I hope they will fill out material for a full album this year and find themselves a label home that will do right by them.