I've got the Evanescence album, plus a few other bits. It's okay, but they do sound rather bolted together: the singer's got a great voice but I can't help but feel she's not really a goth at all - the vocal melodies are very very poppy indeed, whereas, the guitars have gone rather self-consciously Linkin Park. The lyrics are pretty appalling.
Nevertheless, I think it's a pretty good album, though I've been told the early stuff (deleted and according to the band, file-shared with their blessings) is way better. And apparently, although they did indeed start out as a Christian band, they've vehemently distanced themselves from it to such an extent that their record company
wrote to every Christian music store that was stocking them and recalled the CD, stating that they were too embarrassed to keep the album on the shelves of explicitly Christian record companies. Go figure.
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The Italian band Lacuna Coil are their biggest influence - I got Comalies, their latest a while ago and really like it.
It's gothy metal stuff. Musically, I wouldn't say it's anything
particularly innovative - it reminds me of the splendidly OTT
Pandemonium-era Killing Joke - but they do have some rather nice goth keyboard and string lines and a nice line in minor key songs. Lyrically, they're as sh*te as Evanescence but from the opposite perspective,
'Heaven's a Lie' and lots of metaphysical stuff about the terrible, terrible angst they're in, without ever actually saying whether they've been harvested by the demon lord Argoneth for dedication to the destruction of the world or suffered a rather nasty stubbed toe.
Of the two, Lacuna Coil are the better and by some distance, I'd say.