Ah, press releases I love you. According to them with Finnish rockers Lullacry you get gothic metal (well they wear black and I guess there is a bit of musical eyeliner showing) and symphonic metal (there is a bit of piano somewhere on here). Actually what you do get with Lullacry is…. Lullacry.
Never the fastest or heaviest or more goth than thou, Lullacry are a metal band with a rock ‘n’ roll soul that is never entirely buried, always joyfully fighting its way to the surface. However I did find their last album, Vol 4, a little flat somehow so I had concerns mixed with the pleasure at seeing the guys back.
Lullacry set out their stall from the off with Antidote To You. If you’ve never caught them before they have a bright, lively dual guitar sound with a modern Finnish metal edge to the riffs, a nicely solid backbone in the rhythm and they have the distinctive tones of Ms Lainio. On ballads it is a sweet, pure but breathy tone. On the rockers like this it sounds as though she sings very much from the throat and with a slightly nasal twang, a sneer here and there for sassy effect and in an age of cookie cutter goth waifs it’s like a nice hot chilli on your tongue. I’m smiling straight away. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed having this band’s quirky but classy personality about.
You see when it comes down to it, thats what Lullacry have. Personality. Yes they have influences but mostly they sound like Lullacry and if the songs are flowing this is A Good Thing. Without wishing to detract from their metal credentials they have a pop sensibility to their approach to melody and hooks but there is always a good solid riff pushing it forward.
Still An Angel, with it’s distorted vocals and catchy chorus has ‘single’ written through it, but there again so does the more goth Thousand Suns. Lullacry are shamelessly commercial but, unlike most writing on those waters they have both a quality threshold and an intact metal soul. Ok, the ballad duet Feel My Revenge pushes a lot of the wrong buttons for me, but thankfully that rather insipid few minutes is eradicated by a swift vocal headbutt from Tanja on the much more stomping Bad Blood. No one is perfect after all.
Just to prove they can do the ballad thing properly, though, they give us the quite beautiful Gone Are The Days, a song drenched in longing and with an almost but not quite folk feel.
I guess sometimes I do want the band to cut loose a little more and there is only Bad Blood that reaches the metal tantrum levels of the old song Fire Within but when they offer you an album as accomplished and as sweet as this you can forgive a lot. I mean the title track is just the cherry on the cupcake here and itching to be used as a soundtrack in some vampire serial drama somewhere.
No, as the use of such words as ‘commercial’, ‘pop’ ‘sweet’ and ‘ vampire serial drama’ telegraph, it will be way too light for many and will never appeal to die hard fans of Putrid Rectal Kitten Seepage (no, dont tell me, there is a band called that….) but for classy, highly melodic metal ‘n’ roll it’s well worth a good bite. I couldn’t live on a diet of this but as a treat it works wonders and my teeth haven’t rotted yet.
(Gizmo, 8/10)
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