Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The heavy heart, the relentless and frenzied attack on the nervous system and the mad, wild pulse of the perfect and ecstasy ridden; everything you want from a Lacuna Coil album but might have been too afraid to desire.
Lacuna Coil’s new album Delirium once more sees the Italian based band rage with an unmistakable fury, with wrath and passion, so much so that the passion itself spills over and takes the songs of neglect, hate and broken things into a realm where obsession lays. It is passion that the listener cannot help but love and adore, that is nothing other the festering of a disease and one with no known cure but to ride the train and urge it to go faster until the engine is ready to explode in a bedlam of sweat and zeal.
A concept album without straying completely into the art of the Progressive, a recording which takes all the elements of a story without betraying Lacuna Coil’s true roots and expressed musical inheritance and yet, somehow, Delirium sounds as if it has unbuttoned the straight jacket of conformity and allowed the listener a glimpse of what could be. The heat and anger are there, not surprising as the subject matter of neglect, madness and broken and abandoned are dealt with, but there is a fragile beauty wanting to escape the clutches of the metal claw; a taste of the delicate, a butterfly caught in a steel trap but to whom an escape is possible if it sees the light from behind.
In songs such as Blood, Tears, Dust., the phenomenally brilliant Take Me Home, You Love Me Cause I Hate You and My Demons, Lacuna Coil’s rampaging delivery offers a sturdy expose, a robust and strapping wander into the dealings of those to whom the thoughts of insanity are deemed so dangerous that society turns a blind eye to the treatment; it might sound like an archaic notion but the memories of such ill treatment lingers on in the memories of such spaces and Lacuna Coil bring them out and let them devour with wondrous intent.
An honest endeavour, rich in form and brutally interesting in its delivery, Delirium is euphoric and restless.
Ian D. Hall