Band:	Lacuna Coil
Album:	Halflife
Style:	Gothic metal
Release date:	2000

01. Half-Life
02. Trance Awake
03. Senzafine
04. Hyperfast
05. Stars [Dubstar cover]

A rare opportunity. A gem. An unicum. Halflife is all this to the discography of Lacuna Coil, and even more to who's been following them from the very beginning, back in 1994.

The band had just released it's first full-length album, In A Reverie, debuting with a combination of sound, songwriting and lyrics completely new and fresh to the scene. The introspection, the delicate narration of the most fragile human emotions made the album evidently stand out; all this even more reverberated by a distinctive touch in fusing melodic rock music with female vocals. These elements would have come to their highest and ultimate expression 2 years later, with the unparalleled Unleashed Memories, which rose above album music, becoming one single, inextricable stream of unconsciousness, an overpowering flow of sentiments and in-life feelings.

Halflife stands exactly in-between these two moments of the evolution of the band; yet not just for that it entirely succeeds in portraying the transition in musical attitude and even production from the earliest steps to the still unrivaled masterwork. Still, the album has that "roughness" in sound so typical of In A Revere, with instruments playing almost as in live jam-sessions; still, male-female vocals roam free, now dominating the music pattern, now fusing with it. The title track "Halflife" is the perfect example of this, and perhaps the ultimate, true link in the chain of the musical continuum of the band. The track starts right where In A Reverie had stopped, the spiral of "Falling Again" seeming to have led to a distorted future, where again though frailty and incompleteness chain our perception of reality. Male vocals, initially complacent, reveal their ambivalent nature of anger and rebellion, whilst female vocals, in a quasi-daydreaming state, perceive a silver lining in duplicity - that sorrow might well be the hidden disguise of revenge ("So special this feeling to be common like you"). Sapient, melodic guitar riffs knit an ethereal stage as the opposites now struggle, now recompose their unity, in a supreme duet of stages of self-perception. The destructive self openly and brutally accuses its other side of hypocrisy ("You are an unnatural survivor / Self-abuser hurt your own"), while the contemplative self shows greater consciousness of the ultimate unanimity ("It's really weird to say that here in the future / ? / We're incomplete despite of a new millennium"). As the struggle reaches climax, so does the sound pattern elevate, in a final confrontation of unreconciled, yet eternally tied, opposites.

The canvass is set, and the band already elaborates in two steps ("Trance awake", "Senzafine") the themes of time, ineluctability of destiny and solitude, that will underlie several key passages of Unleashed Memories. Yet it is with the final tracks of the EP that Lacuna Coil really impress, delivering in immediate sequence a vibrant cry of revenge, and a detached soliloquy of grief and impotency.

One of the best pieces ever of Lacuna Coil, "Hyperfast" is fast-paced rush, a chant of liberation in which two facets of the same soul act as one, inebriated by newly found freedom. Introspection is deliberately put aside, a "hyperfast reaction" has come, potent and unattended, like in a dream of glory, and power. Emotions are carnal, superhuman ("My blood is flowing as oceans / ? / What is happening is enclosed in my fire"), the challenge is limitless ("Beyond?") - and yet the ultimate object of the fight is that soul inmate from where we cannot escape ("Beyond the day / I'll face myself"). Two have become one ("That's the way we are"); yet still have to make peace with their past, and all the things they were.

As "Hyperfast" comes to a brusque, abrupt conclusion (in the iconic and ironic, acid scream of the word "self", ultimate architrave of the entire EP), the inner dimension of Lacuna Coil's unique songwriting takes the scene back again in "Stars", in what stands as another jewel in their career. Entirely dominated by Cristina's vocals, "Stars" is a choir to an intimate persona, a nocturnal monologue of disillusion, faith painted like stars in the stark vault of the sky. The monologue becomes soliloquy; the soliloquy a strained repetition of the same verses, in what becomes a litany of self-deception.

"The stars / are going out / and this stage is full nothing". All so curiously, it will be the "Heir of a dying day" to crack-open the impetuous stream of emotions in Unleashed Memories, as if the very Halflife transcended to a greater purpose.

No better inception could have been written to that majesty.