Manifesto of Lacuna Coil

Probably one of the most famous metal acts from Northern Italy, Lacuna Coil have experienced many different genres and styles throughout their pretty long career, starting from a doom kind of metal to a more gothic and atmospherical one, finally reaching a new style of melodic rock that keeps, in my opinion, all those tracts of uniqueness that characterized Lacuna Coil since its creation in 1996: the brilliant use of two voices, Cristina's female one and Andrea's male one (who used to associate to his clean vocals a growl/harsh style in the first albums), the melodical vein that accompany almost every song, the preference for an evocative and suggestive guitar style (i.e.: less solos, more atmosphere), and the always enjoyable (and almost never ordinary) lyrical themes related to love, suffering, despair, inner feelings.

This "Manifesto Of Lacuna Coil" is actually the first and only best-of of the whole Lacuna Coil career, and it's greatly composed: it contains, in fact, three or four songs from every album, from their first EP published in 1998 to the last (as of the beginning of 2009, of course) one, the catchy and alternative-rock oriented "Karmacode".

It's useless to make a track-by-track review speaking about compilations, so it would probably be enough to say that here you have all Lacuna Coil's career ordered from the most recent songs to the older ones: the album itself opens with the catchy Our Truth and Closer, pretty simple in the structure (and with no solos at all) but extremely enjoyable, mainly for what concerns Cristina's awesome high-pitched vocals and a smart composition of the refrains, performed in a really pleasant way.

Proceding backwards in time, we come across songs like Heaven's A Lie, which uses a similar canonical structure culminating into catchy refrains sung with the compenetration of the two voices, this time producing a much more gothic metal feeling rather than an "alternative-rock" one; and this is the case of Swamped too, one of the songs in which Andrea's voice fits in the best way, thus preparing the listener to the awesome "When you're taught through feelings.." refrain sung by Cristina.

The older songs, which occupy the last half of the album, are more doomish and heavy, and they greatly represent the first part of Lacuna Coil's career: masterpieces as Senzafine, the only song written in Italian on the whole compilation, have in fact a heavy and more complex touch, no more consisting of a progression that leads to a melodical refrain but giving more attention to the instrumental aspect: this is even the case, for instance, of The Secret, a song which makes great use of the guitars and the atmospherical vein of the band. Tracks like No Need To Explain and the ethereal Cold Heritage, moreover, unite the electric guitars to greatly composed acoustic passages, and they have many melodies, ideas and vocal lines which one can find throughout all Lacuna Coil's discography, even in their last works, and this is an aspect that many detractors of their new style don't consider at all, treating them as a completely different and "pop" band.

In the end, this is an extremely well-produced compilation, with a range of songs that span from Lacuna Coil's very start to their last productions, and it is a must-have - of course - for every Lacuna Coil fan, but more than this it's probably, in my opinion, by far the best way that everyone who wants to enter Lacuna Coil's musical world (or who has heard of them only for what concerns their most recent albums) could undertake in order to get accustomed to the awesome variety of Lacuna Coil's styles and to have a comprehensive idea of the complex musical evolution that this still great band has been crossing so far.