Alberta Stars

Icon Of Coil

Icon of Coil is a reliable source of danceable Industrial tracks. Any self-respecting alternative club has them on the playlist and they're mainstream to rivetheads everywhere. Professional, consistent, polished.

...But true culture of any kind can never survive on consistency alone. Mainstream itself is anathema to a thriving, changing underground music scene because it typically signals the final stage in a band's evolutionary growth. Icon of Coil could have rested on its purely synthetic style in June, but they instead chose to mutate. The show at New City - as lead vocalist Andy LaPlegua admitted to the crowd - marked the first time IoC used electric guitar in a live show. The band had formerly sworn never to encorporate the instrument in their music but that night the axes finally came out.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but the reason I often can't get into a lot of modern Industrial and EBM is precisely that the all-synth sound gets homogenous; there's something missing that gives truly good hard music its soul, and I think that something is electric guitar. IoC wasn't afraid to let the strings roar at the the New City show and I personally beleive that it's the best they've ever sounded!

Professionalism, consistency and polish for the dancefloor are still signs that IoC is serious about their music but so is the willingness to explore. I seriously doubt Icon of Coil is about to go metal, but when the vow was broken, songs like Serenity is The Devil and Dead Enough for Life left the cold virtual machine of pure synthetic and breathed on their own with thunderous melodies of hot steel.

That wasn't so bad, was it?

Adam W
(Staff Writer)