In 2022, the year I arrived in Singapore, the Italian gothic metal band Lacuna Coil played a gig at the city-state’s Esplanade Annex Studio. Although I’d really enjoyed several of the band’s early albums, such as Comalies (2002) and Shallow Life (2009), I somehow, stupidly, missed seeing them on that occasion. When I heard that the band would be paying a return visit to Singapore on February 9th this year, playing in the same venue, I made sure I didn’t make the same mistake again.
Lacuna Coil are currently touring in promotion of their 2025 album Sleepless Empire. The album was well-received by critics, who noted that it showed the band moving towards a darker, heavier sound.
Though plentifully equipped with chugging guitars, earlier Lacuna Coil albums like those I’d mentioned above had prioritised melody over volume. This was embodied in the band’s use of two vocalists, the operatic Christina Scabbia and the rougher, more aggressive-sounding Andrea Ferro. Indeed, to me, they sounded like a goth-metal version of the 1980s Icelandic indie-band the Sugarcubes – wherein a very young Björk’s charmingly fey vocals were offset by the more discordant ones of Einar Ӧrn, allegedly ‘the first punk in Iceland’. Nonetheless, Ferro’s rawer voice was still in synch with the tunes.
At tonight’s gig, I was discombobulated at first to encounter a louder, crunchier, snarlier incarnation of Lacuna Coil than I’d expected – songs from Sleepless Empire made up nearly half the setlist, with previous, gentler albums represented by one or two tracks only. It was also a surprise to hear those alternating vocals. While Scabbia was as operatic as ever, Ferro sometimes indulged in death-growling, Cannibal Corpse-style. Actually, one of Sleepless Empire’s tracks, Hosting the Shadow, was recorded with guest vocals from Randy Blythe of the American thrash / groove metal band Lamb of God, who in the past has provided guest vocals for – surprise! – Cannibal Corpse.
But a few songs into Lacuna Coil’s set, my brain had adjusted and I enjoyed the rest of the gig enormously. And the heaviness of Sleepless Empire was leavened by a few old tracks I’m fond of: Heaven’s a Lie and Swamped off Comalies, Spellbound off Shallow Life. No room, alas, for Survive, the first track on Shallow Life, which is maybe my favourite Lacuna Coil song thanks to its use of a spooky, children’s-nursery-rhyme-like refrain, which sounds like something off the soundtrack of an old giallo movie. (Giallo were a sub-genre of stylish but brutal horror-thrillers developed in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s by directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci. Frequently, the murders in them were the result of someone having suffered childhood trauma, which necessitated flashback scenes accompanied by the sounds of creepy children.) And that brings me nicely to my next point…
One thing I liked about Lacuna Coil’s show tonight was how, visually, they echoed old Italian horror movies, of which I’m a big fan. Bassist Marco Coti Zelati, who also composes the music for and produces their records – Scabbia and Ferro write the lyrics – was slathered in white corpse-paint, except for a dish-shaped portion at the top of his head, which had been painted red and brain-like to suggest his brainpan had been removed. Indeed, he resembled a lumbering, reanimated cadaver from the zombie epics that Lucio Fulci started making after he stopped making giallo. Meanwhile, recently recruited guitarist Daniele Salomone wore a cowl and resembled the hooded villain in Antonio Margheriti’s 1963 horror film The Virgin of Nuremberg.
The colours bathing the stage veered from garish blue to garish red with the abandon of the stylised lighting that drenched the movies of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. And the dark-haired, red-dressed Scabbia would have made a good female lead in an Italian gothic horror, either being menaced (à la Jessica Harper) or doing the menacing (à la Barbara Steele).
Finally, I should say the crowd were appreciative of Lacuna Coil’s artistry, though a few too many phone-cameras were in operation. I’d secured a good position near the front of the stage, but my view of the band was sometimes disrupted by a girl standing before me who held her phone permanently aloft, seemingly hellbent on filming the entire gig. Occasionally, she’d turn and, with a sweep of the arm, try to film the audience behind her too. Whenever she did this, I noticed how her arm swooped up and down so as to avoid getting a close-up of my grizzled, decrepit visage amid these panoramic shots. Heaven forbid — that would have ruined all her footage.
