The Red Coil, from Milano, are Marco Marinoni on vox, Daniele Parini and Luca Colombo on guitars, Toni Viceconti on bass and Antonio “Bull” Carluccio on drums. Back in time The Red Coil bunch was one of the cool unsigned bands populating the fertile Italian heavy underground panorama. The band’s name has some Oriental mystic implications (the idea of Kundalini, the dormant potential force residing in the human organism and represented by a sleepy serpent). However The Red Coil made their way into the scene thanks to their solid, raw and crunchy, alcoholic, southern sludge-stoner metal style encompassing Down, early Black Label Society, Kyuss, Crowbar, Pantera, Orange Goblin, late Corrosion of Conformity, etc., and classic southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top. During 2011 they came back to studio for recording Lam, their debut full-length album. They took it easy for forging the sounds right as they wanted. Lam saw the light during late 2012 while the band inked a contract with the Italian label Buil2Kill Records /Nadir Promotion.
Well, apparently the sleepy Kundalini serpent has waken up again to party, as Lam is over 45 minutes of energetic, testosterone-drenched tunes where vitamins are provided by beer and whiskey! The Red Coil guys broadly stayed faithful to their style briefly outlined above but shaped it around a somewhat heavier sound by much live experience on stage all around Italy in these last years. But another thing that the band didn’t change is its sort of dual face: heavy tunes coupled with mystic feelings, starting right with the cover art and the title of the new album. The term Lam is referred to the chakra where the Kundalini serpent/body energy resides. As explained in a recent interview on the Italian Noize webzine, The Red Coil’s lyrics combine elements of Oriental mysticism and thoughts about personal experiences, everyday defeats, dependance, more or less toxic ways of escaping life’s hardness, inspiration from reading, travels and meeting with other cultures, and so on. So let’s put it like this: with The Red Coil and Lam it will be like being a bit high and get involved into one of those free phylosophical conversations about life that sometimes a bit of alcohol encourages!
In Lam you’ll find 10 tracks sweating out juicy and aggressive heaviness lead by full-fat heavy riffs and rough vocals that will urge you, minimum, to grab a can of a good one. Mahakala, the short atmospheric intro lead by the chanting of Tibetan monks, is tricky and might hint to some psychedelic jamming to follow. But one minute of contemplation or meditation is enough for plunging into the real album, the one made of charges of abrasive riffing, hooking refrains lead by Marco Marinoni’s roaring vocals and tight drumming and Bull’s tight drumming. Tracks may be as short as 3 minutes and a half, like the compact The Ones That Fall from Grace and Barrio Alto, or ballads lasting between 5 and over 6 minutes where the band’s style becomes more narrative. The pace varies between mid-tempo dynamics and periodical slowing down to almost doomy, and occasionally grungy, moods recalling the meditative moments in Down and Alice in Chains more than Black Sabbath. For example, listen to the passionate, dark Mississippian density of Eastern Smell of Smoke.
Tracks like Fuckin’ Numb and are infectious alcoholic ballads where the listener is sweating with the singer and the rest of the bunch while cursing over empty bottles, dust, flies, or whatever and they are all wearing long beards and long hairs like ZZ Top and Zakk Wylde. The Red Coil guys are from Milano and like to practice Oriental meditation, but they are dreaming of and in love with the American wild open spaces as well. So ballad S.S.C. is opened by another distant and equally solemn chant as in the Mahakala intro, a solitary Indian chant. This chant will be quickly absorbed by the roar of the guitars and the furious choirs that keep you headbanging. But melancholy finds its way here as well, with choirs turning sad, almost grungy and eventually morphing into another rhythmic Indian chant. Guitars howling achingly and Marco roaring invocations to the desert sand bring back laid-back swamp atmospheres in the seducing mid-downtempo ballad The Desert’s Crown where blues is ruling.
Track Narcotic Jail is shooting you back into wild headbanging and will not let you breathe with its super-tight groove metal rhythms in the vein of Cowboys From Hell and few rapid incursions into melodies according to Down. Desperation is shouted out again in the strongly melodic Daybreak, where the band is caught between blues-drenched groove metal and intensely doleful, slow, southern sludgy melancholy. The short and fast track Barrio Alto will hook you with its fresh, catchy refrains and will prepare you to the final track of the album, the last slab of blues-drenched tunes, “Beginning from Nowhere”. Useless to say, the band gives a further hommage to the roots of the Devil’s music by knitting an almost 3 minutes-long semi-acoustic blues ballad driven by harmonica, chanting and touches of slide guitar. A burp will be the signal for the riffs to start again for the last charge of genuine, old-style, super-classic, southern rock/metal. And the last sounds greeting you will duly be those from the slide guitar …
So, if you want an innovative or experimental band who is trying to invent a new genre or reinterpret old sounds in an unusual, modern fashion, well … stay away from The Red Coil!
But if you want to enjoy some totally classic southern sludge-groove metal done well and endowed with a wealth of cool riffs, cool raw sounds and some tough vocals. Marco’s vocals are great, both when he is roaring like a wounded bear and when he is indulging in melancholy with his own true calm voice, with no need to strain it like in Phil Anselmo. A mention goes to the excellent treatment of sounds, adequate for the style of the band. So it was worthwhile for the band to be patient and attend long recording/mixing sessions to get the “right sound”, under the care of Andrea Garavaglia (Mesmerize). The mastering by Jacob Bredahl (Hatesphere, Allhelluja) at the Dead Rat Studio (Denmark) gave the final touch. The Red Coil’s album Lam is available as CD via the band’s page and as digital version via Amazon, i-Tunes etc. It is streamed in full on Bandcamp. I guess we’ll hear more from these sludge rockers soon and, why not, it will be interesting to see towards which direction their love for blues and metal will bring them. In the meantime, I think I need another sip of my ice-cold beer …
Words: Marilena Moroni
Official Website
Bandcamp (Full Streaming)