LACUNA COIL UNLEASHED MEMORIES ALBUM CENTURY MEDIA RELEASE: JANUARY 29, 2000 REVIEW: JANUARY 25, 2001

Italy's Lacuna Coil represent the genre called gothic metal very well. They have a female vocalist (beside a male one), lack of humour, boring metal guitars, ridiculous lyrics and a bunch of long haired metal nerds surrounding the girl. Unfortunately, we've met this expression of unintelligence before and this is all very depressing.
The album starts with a few standard songs and the female vocalist Cristina Scabbia handles most of the singing. Well, there's a rather awkward example of the male vocals as well in the first song "Heir of a Dying Day". It sounds as the vocalist tries to imitate James Hetfield and delivers the uncool and silly words "watch the dying day comes". Oh my god.
In the fifth song "Where a Dead Man Walks", hell breaks loose! This so called vocalist is bad even with gothic metal standards. At times he reminds me of a symbiosis of a creatively tormented frog and James Hetfield. I don't know what kind of people can appreciate this. I would recommend a visit to a mental doctor, a radical shock treatment or whatever that could help those poor bastards. However, later on, the vocalist gets slightly better with some kind of puking sounding vocals.
Everything isn't darkness. The track "Cold Heritage" is actually pretty good, believe it or not. Cool rhythms, no male vocals and no heavy guitars - it actually reminds me of some kind of pop tune. Apart from that nice little song, there's nothing, absolutely nothing for me here, so I can only nod when Cristina Scabbia when she sings "I'm a looser"!

JOHAN ASTEMARK