Lacuna Coil – Shallow Life

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One of the biggest metal exports from Italy, Lacuan Coil have enjoyed a purple patch in their career to date with back-to-back critically and commercially successful albums in Comalies and Karmacode, which is always a dangerous position to be in. The next album can either be more of the same, to please the fickle masses, or be completely different, to evolve the band’s sound, as all bands should strive to do. With Shallow Life they’ve aimed at a middle-ground, but haven’t really achieved much in the way of evolution. The main riff to opener Survive is their heaviest yet, with hints of Soulfly, but the rest of the song is pretty anonymous, and indeed several of the tracks, just like on Karmacode, are a bit nondescript (I’m Not Afraid, lead track Spellbound, The Maze). Other tracks try some new styles/sounds, to varying degrees of success, in most cases reverting to the tried and tested Lacuna Coil formula for the choruses, and that pretty much sums up Shallow Life. Other examples are the title track, which gets nowhere at all, and I Like It, which takes on a haunting atmosphere for its verses, but is otherwise just another song. The album really lacks something with the groove of Our Truth, but one or two tracks do stand-out, like a doomy The Pain and excellent acoustic/piano ballad Wide Awake. Ultimately this is just more Lacuna Coil, which will no doubt please all the fans who discovered them via the last two discs, but really isn’t good enough for a band now in their eleventh year.

Written by Andy Lye
More: Albums, Alternative, Female-fronted, Quick.Play Reviews, Lacuna Coil