The Hellacopters - Overdriver (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2025
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This ninth album from the Hellacopters runs forty minutes, hardly the longest album I've put on this week but certainly not skimpy with its music. However, every time it finishes, it feels like I've only been listening for about ten minutes. Its eleven tracks zoom on by, only two of them lasting longer than four minutes. When they actually pick up a serious pace, like with Wrong Face On, it seems like the track is done in about thirty seconds. I'd listened to it five times before noon and that's just ridiculous for me.

Initially it's good but not great, because the first three songs are just solid and reliable garage rock songs that do exactly what they must without grabbing me by the feels. Maybe that's due to a reliance on sixties pop melodies. Wrong Face On has that uptick in tempo and then Soldier On caught my attention. It's a strong song but that's not why it stood out. It stood out because the influences that I caught weren't the ones that I would have expected from a Hellacopters album. And I don't mean the core riff that's borrowed from Golden Earring's Radar Love.

I expected them to sound like a garage rock band, as indeed they do on much of this album. Check out Faraway Looks, for instance, and you'll find that it's utterly textbook garage rock, built from power chords, flurried beats, a simple but effective riff, punchy vocals and catchy melodies. Sure, there's a little back and forth harmonising that reminds of Blue Öyster Cult and that adds to the effect, but it's mostly what I expect, done really well by a band who have been doing this for over thirty years.

Soldier On, however, has a real southern rock mindset to it and it's far from the only such song on the album. That feel returns on Coming Down, shows up in the melodies on The Stench and then in the epic guitar solo on Leave a Mark that eventually finds that patented southern rock chicken scratch style. It's in moments like that where Lynyrd Skynyrd spring to mind, but the comparison I kept coming back to was The Outlaws, because it's not just the guitarwork, it's the melodies.

Now, Soldier On has odd vocal manipulations in the verses, but that Outlaws sound is unmissable once they get to the bridges and choruses. And, once it's out there, this genie can't be put back into the bottle. It's there on Doomsday Daydreams, it's all over Coming Down like a rash and it's there on later songs, whether it's in the vocal melodies, the builds or the guitars or all of these things together. It frankly changed this album for me and, while I dug punkier garage rock songs like Wrong Face On and Faraway Looks, I liked these dips into southern rock even more.

I'd probably rank Coming Down at the top of the heap, but with Leave a Mark nipping at its heels, especially with its epic guitar solo at the end to stretch it out to five minutes and change. That's a long song for the Hellacopters, even kicking off with a bass intro that's not far off what Lemmy used to do back in his Hawkwind days. I'm not finding a line-up online, so I don't know if this is the work of Dolf DeBorst, who Wikipedia tells me joined in 2018 but doesn't appear on any albums, a contradictory statement given that this is their second album since reforming in 2016.

Doomsday Daydreams keeps growing on me, so I'd throw that in there as another highlight, and, back in more traditional territory, Faraway Looks and Wrong Face On are right up there as well. I'd usually call an album with five highlights out of eleven a gimme for an recommended 8/10 rating, but Soldier On, with its southern rock flavour, and The Stench with a bluesier version of the same, are the only others that I like a lot. That means four songs that are just there, including the first three, which is an odd state of affairs, and that's telling too.

Then I realised that I've listened through this album maybe eight or nine times now and, even if some songs still refuse to pop for me, I haven't felt the need to skip any of them even once. That firmed this back up as an 8/10. I haven't heard its predecessor, 2022's Eyes of Oblivion, but I'd say on the basis of this one that the band are really enjoying their reunion and maybe feeling some flexibility in their sound. DeBorst aside, if indeed that's him on bass, everyone else is long term.

Nicke Andersson, Robert Eriksson and Dregen were founder members, even if the latter left for quite a while. Anders Lindström only missed the first few years but has been there ever since. I'd say they're having a blast and, while I like them doing what they've always done, I can only hope that they keep exploring this southern rock direction. Coming Down and Leave a Mark especially show that they do it really well.

Harakiri for the Sky - Scorched Earth (2025)

Country: Austria
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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There are two distinct sides to Harakiri for the Sky, appropriately enough given that there are a couple of very different musicians in the band.

Matthias Sollak plays most of the instruments, the one exception being the drums, which fall to Kerim Lechner, Krimh of Act of Denial, Dååth and Septicflesh. I don't know how many there are, beyond the traditional, but there's plenty of keyboard work and not all of it sounds like a piano. Without You I'm Just a Sad Song, for example, starts and ends with a memorable melody played on some sort of chime. Melody is everywhere, because Sollak combines a black metal resilience with the delicate melodic ear of a pop artist.

I use the term resilience there, because the traditional black metal wall of sound doesn't appear particularly often, perhaps coming closest on Keep Me Longing and Without You I'm Just a Sad Song. It's less of a barrier than a sort of last effort countercharge, the cover art seeming highly appropriate. It's as if the melodic side is the dominant norm but, when threatened, it turns dark and attacks as a form of defence.

Michael Kogler provides the vocals, which are certainly memorable but seem limited. He doesn't shriek in black metal style but doesn't really shift to any of the other standards. He's a lot closer to a hardcore shout than a death metal growl but he isn't really there either. It's a hoarse shout that carries a little of the bleakness we expect from black metal. That places it a long way from the stereotypical orc sound into a more traditional metal vein that's been dipped into extreme. However, just as hardcore shouts are inherently limited to the one emotion of anger, these are limited to the one of righteous despair.

As a result, this took me way back to when Sid at Groové Records in Halifax gave me a promo CD of Dark Tranquillity's debut album, 'Skydancer'. He described it as wonderful music spoiled by a rough vocal and, while I'll cut him some slack there because it was the beginning of a genre and that vocal style was relatively new, it's exactly what I felt here. There's nothing wrong with what Kogler does, but it's so limited in emotional palette that it's holding back the music.

In fact, my favourite two songs are the last two, which I believe may be considered bonus tracks, both of which feature clean guest vocalists. There's a little of that on the last track proper, Too Late for Goodbyes, courtesy of Serena Cherry, a British singer who may have her own one woman black metal outfit in Noctule but otherwise sings post-rock for Svalbard. Her contribution, which is for part of that song only, is the signpost to what will come for all of Street Spirit and Elysian Fields, to wrap everything up. Starting the album over from there only highlights the difference between how those clean voices reach so much more range than Kogler's hoarse shout.

Street Spirit is a Radiohead cover and the guest is Patrick Ginglseder, P.G. in German black metal band Groza. However, he sings entirely clean on this one and with a glorious sustain that makes him soar very nicely indeed. Tellingly, the guest on Elysian Fields is a dream pop musician, Daniel Lang of Austrian band Backwards Charm. While dream pop may well be the exact opposite genre to full on raw black metal, that vocal style fits the post-black style that Sollak has moved into. While Ginglseder's delivery on Street Spirit is majestic, I suddenly wanted to hear Lang sing for the rest of the album.

After all, it's all about melody. As I listen through again and again, I find myself surprised at how much of it is heavy, given that the melody remains dominant. It's faster early, dropping down to midpace for much of the second half hour, but delicate instrumental stretches and the broader melodic sweep are what stick in my brain the most. That's all Sollak.

Now, Harakiri for the Sky have been around for quite a while, this being their sixth album since they formed in 2011, and they certainly seem to have reached an impressive audience. This is my first experience of their work, so I don't know if I'm an outlier who simply doesn't appreciate this vocal style, something I'm used to with metalcore, or whether Sollak is gradually moving further from Kogler's range. If you're a long term fan, you're on board with that style and can probably safely add a point to my rating. It's a 7/10 for the music and a 6/10 overall.

Bumblefoot - ...Returns! (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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It's almost impossible to categorise this ninth album from Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal beyond calling it guitar music and, given that he's a guitarist, that's kind of a given. Whether you know his work from Guns n' Roses, Sons of Apollo or from solo releases, there will be something here that you'll never have heard before, because he very deliberately trawls in whatever style of music he feels will work for a particular piece.

The opener, Simon in Space, is probably the closest to what you might expect. There are plenty of heavy note bending sections wrapped around more laid back solos and even those laid back solos are intricate and virtuosic. It's the sort of track that tends to sit on albums like this whether they carry the name of Bumblefoot or another guitar wizard like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani rather than a shredder whose tracks are faster and more deliberately awe-inspiring. He's going for mood and feel not technical genius, but there's plenty of technical genius used to get there. Eight minutes of that leads into five more of Planetary Lockdown, which is a little lighter and sassier but in the same ballpark.

And then things go off the rails, as it were. Moonshine Hootenanny is the lively bluegrass knees up that its name suggests, Bumblefoot's guitar variously playing roles that might otherwise go to banjos or lap steels. Sure, there's some of that heavy notebending a couple of minutes in and it leads into a more traditional rock guitar solo, but the bluegrass returns quickly enough. That's followed by Chopin Waltz Op64 No2, which is a well known classical piece. There's another one of these later on in Funeral March, also written by by Frederic Chopin, but while the former is just a transcription to electric guitar, starting with the frantic bit, the latter is a guitar and violin duet with an ominous backdrop.

That highlights that he doesn't do everything here himself, though I'd guess that he does come close. Ben Karas, best known for Thank You Scientist, is the guest violinist who combines so well with him on Funeral March, but household names like Steve Vai and Brian May also show up for guitar duets. Vai's on Monstruoso and May's on Once in Forever. Guthrie Govan may not be quite as famous as them, but he's played with Asia, ironically after asking May, Steven Wilson and Hans Zimmer, with whose band he's been playing live for almost a decade now. He's on Anveshana.

Of those, it's Anveshana that I like the most. Monstruoso is an experience, with heavy and fuzzy electronica almost dominating, enough that it gets a brief reprise in Monstruoso II (Departure). Once in Forever has a country tone without necessarily becoming a country song in the way that Moonshine Hootenanny absolutely becomes a bluegrass song. Anveshana benefits immediately from a tasty groove and the guitar melody feels like it's singing rather than soloing. That combo makes it a highly accessible piece but it stands up to a deeper dive too.

However, it's far from my favourite piece on the album. Funeral March tops that list for me, even if it's the one song that most prominently features an instrument other than the guitar. Cintaku comes pretty close to it though, with its organic beat and melodic guitar line. Like Anveshana, it seems like the guitar is transcribing lyrics. I could believe that this is a Journey song with lyrics in a parallel universe and Bumblefoot's tapped into that for an instrumental version in ours. Oddly, the solo in the middle feels more spacy without apparently trying than on earlier songs where it was absolutely trying to live up to that delightfully weird cover art.

And, with a brief mention for the delightful Andalusia, on which Bumblefoot appears to only play one note but continues to bend it in different directions forever—at least for forty-nine seconds, because that's how long the piece lasts—then there's The Thread, which seems like it's the epic of the album, even though it's three minutes shorter than the opener.

It's an old school instrumental of the sort we might expect to hear on a Jeff Beck album and, as it evolved, building smoothly to explosive moments, I realised that it's echoing what Roy Buchanan did with The Messiah Will Come Again, sans vocals. Once I caught that, I realised just how much phrasing feels very similar. It surely can't hurt to bear comparison to one of the greatest guitar pieces ever played, even if it inevitably comes off as lesser. It's still very tasty indeed.

And so there's surely something here for every guitar fan, even major use of the most seventies technical gadget, the talkbox, on Griggstown Crossing, but, like so many guitar albums, it's all so varied that it's mostly going to impress actual guitarists.

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Neofolk
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
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Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Jason Bieler and the Baron von Bielski Orchestra - The Escapologist (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

This is the third album from former Saigon Kick main man Jason Bieler and his Baron von Bielski Orchestra, which has coalesced into Andee Blacksugar and Edu Cominato, plus a bunch of guests on bass and all sorts of other contributions. It's very much what you might expect from Bieler, if what you expect is rooted in the Beatles-like melodies and grungy guitars that Saigon Kick often displayed but with songs veering off into what seems like every other genre possible at the drop of a hat. Industrious is precisely this, infectious melodies over grungy riffs but with an unusually repetitive lyric, almost a song built around a single repeated verse.

Now, it's not just that, because it goes instrumental soon into its second half and I found myself falling into this section on repeat listens. It explains why Blacksugar is credited on "extra guitars, noises and solos" because that pretty much covers what we hear. There are strong solos on Stars Collide and Violent Creatures too, to which I'm leaping ahead right now because I need to point out that both of them are worthy songs on their own merits. Even on my second time through, I deliberately skipped Savior to test this. Violent Creatures is better than Stars Collide, because it starts out with a lovely slow riff and later brings in tasty escalations, but both are decent songs. Cue them up on YouTube and you'll enjoy them.

The reason I mention that is that, if we listen to the album in order, as is surely intended, we'll be listening to Savior before them and suddenly they get lost in the mix. Savior only runs three and a half minutes, but its impact lasts for triple that, if not more, and it's literally hard to listen to a different song while it's partying in our skulls. If I hadn't deliberately skipped Savior, there's just no way I'd have even registered Stars Collide and it took a lot of effort from Violent Creatures to grab me back again. Savior is that dominant.

Needless to say, it's my favourite song here and it's a worthy first single. There's plenty else that deserves praise here, from the tasty guitar solo on Hollow to the grungy riff on Zombies & Black Swans, from the jaunty beat on No Real Goodbyes to the weird noises on Space Debris, but there isn't anything to even come close to Savior until the final two songs, Sacred Cow and March of the Vikonauts, which are very different indeed, both from each other and from Savior.

Sacred Cow flows delightfully and effortlessly until it gets jaunty in its second half. Somehow it's able to soar like Extreme singing a power ballad but experiment like Mark Ribot playing jazz and both happen in the same song without ever seeming out of place. To be fair, we never quite know what to expect from Bieler expect incessant melodies that are so effortlessly infectious that we wonder why anybody else even bothers to try to compete with him. This unuusal combination is a relatively straightforward one for him.

March of the Vikonauts gets serious with guitar, Blacksugar taking us into Joe Satriani territory. Even though his guitarwork would be a highlight in any other song, it's the groove of this one I'd call out the most. It's all over the map in the best possibly ways, trawling in lots of Led Zeppelin, the expected Saigon Kick and even some classical mindset, all of which flow so naturally that we have to concentrate to realise just how damn clever it all is. It's also a song that's good during its first half but which finds whole new levels during its second.

All of which means that this is another excellent album from Bieler, which doesn't remotely shock me. I gave the previous two Baron von Bielski albums recommended 8/10s and there aren't many albums I'd rate higher than Saigon Kick's Water. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't warrant a third 8/10 in a row, which is a fair acknowledgement of just how consistently good Bieler is, and, of course, his set of eccentrically named collaborators. I'm happy to live in a world where people named Diatribe Impossibles, Nigel Biggles, Renaldo Eclipse Jr., Pleasant Strife North, Steambath McCrarey, Wilhelmina Waistaway and Bernadette Babbles are credited on the same album.

But back to Savior. There's a mere hint of world music before Cominato launches into a beat that would have been worthy of an Adam Ant song but is even more in your face. The brass punctation and steel drums fit that approach too, as does the guitar solo, whistle and backing vocalisations giving encouragement. The lead vocals are quintessential Bieler, but everything else feels to me like something Ant and Pirroni might conjure up and given that they're the only songwriters I'm able to name who write songs as infectiously catchy as Bieler, bringing these mindsets together is a slice of heaven.

The only catch is that, once you've heard Savior, you won't be able to hear anything else without serious effort for a long, long time. That's my first candidate for song of the year right there. In fact, now I've heard it again as I polish off this review, I'm going to stop listening to all the other worthy songs here and throw on Friend or Foe. It's only taken forty-three years for something to match it.

Dawn of Solace - Affliction Vortex

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter

Tuomas Saukkonen seems to be alternating his bands lately. The previous Dawn of Solace album, Flames of Perdition, came out in 2022, then Before the Dawn released Stormbringers in 2023 and Wolfheart issued Draconian Darkness in 2024. Now he's back to Before the Dawn for their fourth album and the third I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. For anyone new to all of these, he's a Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Wolfheart play melodic death metal, Dawn of Solace play gothic metal and Before the Dawn are in between, playing both.

This album follows closely from its predecessor, many songs starting out in gothic rock territory but building into a metal crunch. The metal is usually relatively slow and doomy, with occasional shifts in tempo like the glorious urgency midway through Invitation. The vocals are mostly clean, courtesy of Mikko Heikkilä, best known for Kaunis Kuolematon, but Saukkonen occasionally adds a harsh voice, starting on Fortress. I like both voices—Heikkilä's an elegant tenor, Saukkonen's a rich growl—but they're also highly compatible. Into the Light and Perennial put them into close proximity, Dream combines them and both work a lot better than the alternation of verses in Fortress.

In fact, Into the Light is the point where this album grabbed me. I'm used to these Dawn of Solace albums taking a while to take firm root in my brain. That happened with both Waves and Flames of Perdition and it happened here too. First time through, it sounded good but ephemeral, with nothing sticking. Second time through, Into the Light stood up for attention. Third time through, it s all started to take hold and I was relishing riffs and melodies like they were old favourites. Why it takes me a few listens with Dawn of Solace, I don't know, because that usually happens with much more complex music than this, but it happens nonetheless.

Whatever the reason, Into the Light is the first gem. Murder opens up capably enough but it also ends rather unsatisfyingly, just wandering out of the door as if it doesn't think we're paying any attention to it. Fortress is decent enough too, but seems to missing something. Into the Night is perfectly formed, with an achingly slow beat in the verses that stays achingly slow even when an entirely different beat leaps into action alongside it. Somehow it's doomy and urgent all at once and that makes it fascinating. Add a strong melodic line and those two voices working very nicely together and it becomes quite the track.

It's followed by another gem in Rival, which is so effortlessly elegant that it seems to be carved out of mahogany. If there's some My Dying Bride to be found in Into the Light, there's plenty of Paradise Lost in Rival, especially in the guitarwork during the first minute. Then it drops away to create a sense of space for Heikkilä's delicious voice to explore the way we expect from someone like Soen. And then everything builds powerfully, all the more so on Invitation, into gothic metal crunch like we'd expect from Lacrimas Profundere but with those hints at doom/death that come especially from Saukkonen's vocals.

Put all that together and the result a heady mix that's right up my alley. Everything that follows is decent at the very least, the first two songs being the weakest for me, but the best of them sit at the heart of the album, especially Into the Light and Rival but with Invitation on their heels. It plays consistently from there, with Perennial perhaps playing up the doom/death even more and the closer, Mother Earth, following suit with a minute and a half of soothing electronica tacked onto the end to fade out the album. Nothing here lasts past five minutes, including Mother Earth, if we discount that outro.

And so this is another strong album from Dawn of Solace that took me a few listens to fully grasp. I'll figure out why one day. For now, I just let it play and feel very little, let it play again and feel a little more, let it play a third time and suddenly it's right up my alley and I wondering why it took me so long to realise it. What are the odds that album number five, probably due after the next from Before the Dawn and Wolfheart releases, works exactly the same way? Pretty good, I think.

Lacuna Coil - Sleepless Empire (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Alternative Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Tiktok | Tumblr | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I ended my review of Lacuna Coil's 2019 album, Black Anima, by suggesting that I used to be a big fan back in their gothic metal days but their sound had shifted musically over the years to a point where it just wasn't for me any more. Well, I like this tenth album a lot more than that ninth, so maybe I was wrong about that. Most of its limitations are precisely the same as last time out but there are more instances where they break through them to do something more interesting.

As always, my favourite aspect of modern day Lacuna Coil is the clean vocal approach of Cristina Scabbia, which hearkens back to their gothic days more here than on Black Anima. She soars all over this album, perhaps most notably on Sleep Paralysis, the catch being that it's hard to focus on the music behind her. It's there but it's generally just a texture for her to soar over. It's like it unfolds in black and white but she soars in colour. It takes exactly the same role for Andrea Ferro, her male counterpart, but his harsh voice is always far less effective, weaker not through being bad but through being generic. It becomes just another texture for her to play against.

While Scabbia is enjoyable throughout, there are a few points that echo the intro to Venificium on the previous album by doing something much more diverse and interesting. The first arrives with Gravity, where Ferro joins Scabbia in a chant that sounds like it's in Latin and sounds rather like something that might have appeared on an early album. In Nomine Patris opens in a similar manner but with more of a pagan edge. That's only the beginning to why that song is easily my favourite here. Scabbia's melodic choices and a slower pace remind strongly of their early days, even if the instrumentation shifts inevitably away to their modern sound.

My least favourite aspect is the fact that the instrumentation is fundamentally bland across the majority of the songs, but here that serves well to highlight where that's not the case. There's a clear element of electronica on Oxygen and Scabbia's shout at the outset is manipulated. It has noticeable tempo shifts and an actual riff we can focus on. There's another of those, albeit in a more modern staccato style, on the closer, Never Dawn. Oxygen even drops away entirely at the three minute mark to leave Scabbia a capella. It's a good touch.

Gravity gets even more interesting. After that opening chant, there's even more electronica and there are strings in there too, albeit presumably generated by Marco Coti Zelati's synths rather than an actual string section. When the vocals kick in, they're sassy like nu metal taking on tribal music and it's both vocalists in duet. That tribal element is dotted over a few songs, whether in a vocal chant, most obviously on Never Dawn, or through more interesting synths. The same song sounds like it features a didgiridoo early on. I wasn't expecting that on a Lacuna Coil album.

There are two songs featuring guests, which often tends to mean standout songs, but not on this album. Hosting the Shadow features Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, another massively successful modern band that tend to leave me dry live or in the studio andthis song works that way. At least his nuanced harsh vocals demonstrate how limited Ferro is. It's almost mindboggling that he was a founder member of the band who carried all the vocal duties for two years before Scabbia was brought on board. Then again, back then they didn't sound like this. In the Mean Time adds Ash Costello from New Years Day, who I don't know and won't be checking out because of this.

Instead, I'll throw out another compliment I wasn't expecting to trawl out. As I mentioned earlier, it's always the vocals of Scabbia (and, to a lesser degree, Ferro) that drive Lacuna Coil's sound in their modern incarnation. Everything relies on Scabbia's melodies or the contrast that Ferro can bring to bear and the music is just a crunchy texture behind them rather than something that we can enjoy on its own merits. Because of all that, this becomes vocal music and there were plenty of tracks on Black Anima that felt like pop songs fed through a modern metal filter. That's really not the case here, which I'd see as a good thing. The only one that plays that way for me is I Wish You Were Dead, which could have been by any of the modern pop divas with a different filter.

So, as much as I've talked up limitations, I liked this a lot more than I did Black Anima. I gave that album a 6/10 and this easily deserves a 7/10, even from me, not remotely being part of the target audience for this band any more. In fact, I'd go further and say that I enjoyed it, even though I'm still acutely missing the gothic elements, solos and instrumental sections and guitars—this is so bass heavy that I only heard the guitars on a few tracks, Scarecrow best highlighting how Zelati's bass was doing the job of the guitar across most of the album. Now, let's see what my son thinks of it, because he's much more of a fan of Lacuna Coil's modern sound.

Sisters Doll - Scars (2025)

Country: Australia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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Sisters Doll are new to me, but they've been around since 2010, starting out in Collie, Western Oz and now based in Melbourne. Technically, of course, they've been together since the youngest of the four musicians involved was born, given that they're a quartet of brothers, the Miletos. This is their third album, after Welcome to the Dollhouse in 2012 and All Dolled Up in 2017. Their own website calls them glam rock and there's some of that here but it looks far more overt on earlier releases, where the aesthetic you might expect for that genre is played up to.

Here, it starts out hard and heavy. Purgatory may well be the most elegant intro that I've heard thus far in 2025, acoustic Spanish guitar shifting up to electric rock with a tasty tone and it hints at what the first couple of songs proper deliver, a hard rock vibe with a guitar that clearly wants to get a little heavier than that. This pair, Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner, are highlights right out of the gate, if maybe a little lighter than I expected. There's some Bryan Adams in the vocals of Brennan Mileto and the hooks are just as important as the riffs. The heaviness remains in the guitar, Austin Mileto searing through a strong solo in Climbing Out of Hell, as if he wants to play for Ozzy in the early eighties.

The hints at softness are only fleeting in these two songs, but they're more obvious in Change, a lighter song with a subtle guitar hook and an alternative rock level of fuzz. First Time follows suit but with a country twang to the guitar that leads into even lighter territory. It's as if Sisters Doll want to be categorised as a rock band pure and simple without any further qualifiers to that. It's in scope to drift into softer songs with pop sensibilities but also to escalate into heavier territory, especially when Austin Mileto wants to rock out. First Time is the epitome of this, starting out as more of a pop song but heavying up later on.

What's telling is that, while Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner remain highlights and serve as my favourite songs here, there are other highlights still to come that don't play in their ballpark. I'd call out Don't Give Up on Us, a lighter but more urgent song with a bouncy rhythm and excellent hooks; United, an old school heavy metal anthem downshifted to a rock framework; and You Can't Bring Me Down, a punchy rock number with plenty of sass. This latter is the sort of rock song that Iron Maiden might heavy up on a B side, but I could easily hear a hair metal band covering it too.

None of these songs are particularly long, everything lasting three or four minutes until we get to the closer, which is six because it really wants to build. It's the title track and it opens with the first acoustic guitar intro since Purgatory, with strings to deepen it. It plays out for a while like a power ballad but escalates four minutes in to emphatic vocals and guitar. It's another string to a very impressive repertoire of sounds, with a blues ending here (You Can't Bring Me Down) and a sassy glam strut there (Take You Away), but a commercial yearning over yonder that goes as far as prominent hand claps (Kiss Me).

While I'm very happy with the range that Sisters Doll exhibit here, what I like the most is how the album runs a respectable three quarters of an hour without a single song lowering the quality. It would be fair to say that I like some of these songs a lot more than others, but I don't dislike any of them and I wouldn't call any of them filler. What I wonder is how they're changing over time, a song like Take You Away fitting the image I get from their bio but the others suggesting quite an impressive divergence from that niche. In other words, I rather want to listen to their earlier two albums to see where they came from but firmly expect that they wouldn't be as varied as Scars.

And that bodes well for the future, even if they're clearly not the most prolific band in the world and may well not be the most prolific band on their street in Melbourne. With the gap between albums increasing from five to eight years, I just hope we don't have to wait another eleven for a fourth album. Next week would be nice, of course, but 2027 to return to a five year average would work and give them a couple of years to promote this one on stage.