Random Rant: Lacuna Coil

My first proper rant and it is something that has bugged me for a while, the way bands can often be accused of changing their style to a more commercial one to gain chart success. They lose the old fans but gain a set of new ones. Sometimes they are heavily criticised for doing so, at other times it seems encouraged.
I bought a few albums recently, all of which were initially a disappointment to me given the band's previous work. Some then grew on me more than others, some remained disappointing.
I'll probably come back to this topic in future psots but for today I want to talk about the latest Lacuna Coil album, Shallow Life.
Back in the day Lacuna Coil were critically praised and had a small fanbase. The release of their third album, Comalies, saw their fanbase expand a lot and their next album, Karmacode, appeared to be a massive change in style to try and capitalise on this. It was criticised by many of the fans of their classic style.
But I think the progression was actually a natural one.
Their early albums contained long songs with lots of guitar solos, slow paced and with vocals mainly from their supremely talented frontwoman, Christina.
Comalies, which remains their best album in my opinion, had enough of these traits but you can also see the shortening of the songs, the reduction of solos and the emergence of the male co-vocalist. I think these developments were ignored because the album was great and the blanace was right. If LC has stopped at this point in terms of direction it would have been perfect.
But Karmacode showed the furthering of this trend, with the songs becoming all 'comercial' 3 minutes in length, Christina being often reduced to a backing singer and the lack of practically any guitar solos. Crucially perhaps they also experimented with a few different styles, possibly to attract new fans.
The album was crucified critically and many fans hated it, although the album itself was not that bad. The thing that got to me was that fans siad they were selling out, a term which I hate, and that they had changed their style for commercial success. I disagree and point to the trend that had long since been developing in their music.
The latest album, Shallow Life, does bring back some of the old style but the balance they had on Comalies is no longer apparent and actually it strikes me as ther worst album yet. But not because they were attempting to sell out!!
Any new fans would be advised to buy Comalies and see the live where they remian excellent.