LACUNA COIL - Sleepless Empire

Written by Chris Magdalenski

In Praise of Relentless Reliability:

A Review of Sleepless Empire by Lacuna Coil

At this point Lacuna Coil has been around long enough for them to have appeared on and fallen off my musical radar a number of times. That said, having returned to them for their recent release Sleepless Empire I’m forced to ask myself why Milan’s preeminent goth metal band ever fell out of my rotation at all. 

From the hammer-drop opening of the album’s first track, The Siege, everything I love about this band came crashing back into focus. Brutal riffs are the burning soul of each offering — the dark engine that propels the epic song craft and provides a dense foundation for the ever-present push and pull of Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro’s vocals.

For me, it’s this vocal dynamic that has me coming back to Lacuna Coil again and again. The combination of Ferro’s raw rumbling fury playing off of Scabbia’s urgently operatic war cries imbue each song with a whirlwind-like quality — a ride on a pitch black roller coaster of rage to redemption, along with every other emotion in between. Not that this is anything new. It’s a style that’s been happening in metal for quite sometime now, but after a 30 year career I think it’s safe to say there are few bands that do it quite as well.

Rediscovering Lacuna once again has me going back through some of the albums I’ve missed, more than happy to bring this band back into the soundtrack of my life. And for those of you who never strayed from the Cult Of The Coil… 

I know… I know… What took me so long?

For more Lacuna Coil, visit their Bandcamp