The RMR crew just covered Lacuna Coil‘s 2025 Sleepless Empire piece. And the merciless judges over at the RMR Review Desk found the band’s newest chunk of alloy quite to their taste. Now, if you remember, the last two records, Delirium and Black Anima, found effusive praise from all corners of LC‘s fan universe. And these two pieces were indeed quite impressive.
In contrast, the aforementioned Sleepless Empire got a somewhat mixed reception from critics and fans alike. And that made us reach into the past to understand the present better. So, let’s get a closer look at Comalies of 20021 and let the past be the judge of the today’s sins. Heavy-handed rulings straight ahead.
Let’s face it, Lacuna Coil‘s 3rd album back in 2002 definitely is their real starting point. True, In A Reverie and Unleashed Memories found pretty snazzy praise, and some reviewers still lust after them to this day. But Comalies here really put the petal to the metal,2 in a way that would influence many a band’s future work. Of course, Comalies also let itself be influenced by records of the not-so-distant past. Look no further than Swamped at the very beginning, and already you feel the weight of Tiamat gently bearing down on you. And that’s somewhat unsurprising. Waldemar Sorychta produced Comalies, same as Tiamat’s Wildhoney piece back in ’94. So, whom are we kidding, right? He was in charge of this here record, too.
Already in the early ’00s, Cristina Scabbia proved to be the ultimate driving force of Lacuna Coil. Comalies positively gorges with her high-pitched wails, thoughtful crooning, even some psych laden monologues. And perhaps this was a somewhat preternatural version of her future self at that time. Yet, Andrea Ferro‘s contribution probably was the most amazing facet of this album. You won’t find much of those terrible growls that emerged on later records. Albeit, Humane and Angel’s Punishment contain some dire beginning of that specific chapter of Lacuna Coil‘s long career. And these unclean vocals were failures at first. But after an overhaul of sorts, Ferro‘s contribution morphed into the merciless roars that we know today. But this happened only somewhere as of Delirium. Yet on Comalies, we found often harmonious clear-voice contributions, much in line with early Melodic Metal. And – most interestingly – the beginnings of the Beauty and the Beast approach the band would cultivate so strongly later.
Comalies takes no prisoners and already delivers a hammer blow with the Swamped and Heaven’s a Lie combo. Two killer tracks that are pretty reminiscent of what was to come in the not-so-distant future. Interestingly, the band was taken aback by the fulgurant success of Heaven’s a Lie generated and quickly followed up with a professionally made video (see below). That got us confused a bit because the power of that particular track is obvious from the start. And case in point, the band must have known it, too. Why else would this one appear in second place on the tracklist?
But all of the above also means that we have a somewhat front-loaded album on our hands. Luckily, Comalies contains enough pretty cool and – more importantly – varied material to bail them out. For instance, the aforementioned Humane with its neat, slow-grinding groove. Or take the psych-laden mid-tempo Aeon / Tight Rope combo. Aeon will glaze over you with an abundance of ambient acoustics with – hold on to something – a faux vinyl fault. Tight Rope – in contrast – spins the yarn further with some industrial and fantasy sample bridge and a – what was to become – typical Scabbia / Ferro tag team production thing.
What else? The strange case of the synth-laden Angel’s Punishment fascinated the RMR crew some. Again, the band leans far into the gothically tainted psych/fantasy realm and backs this up with some otherworldly dystopian monologue. Whereas Comalies – the title track – brings everything to a groove-laden close. Even when the choice to sing some of that in Italian raised the cringe level somewhat.
In the end, Comalies rightly morphed into a cult record and became the (unofficial) starting point for this band’s long-standing and very successful career. A record that the 2025 Sleepless Empire happily revisited to get more mileage out of this age-old machine still. But I daresay, the piece also became an influencing factor for the work of many a band’s crown jewels of the future. Varied, with a perfect mix of harsh and soft. A record made by a band not shy to let their creative juices flow wherever they took them. And that is what any act out there should always do.
Record Rating: 9/10 | Label: Century Media Records | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 29 October 20023