Yes: this review is late. There's a reason for that: this text is about the first event of the year aimed at the Rio Grande do Sul audience covered here on the site, and it will be quite different. Lacuna Coil returned to Porto Alegre after six years (the band didn't come here in 2017), presenting a new album of unreleased tracks to their surprisingly large fanbase. After all, we're talking about a band that had some success during the glory years of the ever-nostalgic gothic metal scene, before it was crushed, swallowed, and regurgitated by the mainstream almost two decades ago.
Back then, vocalist Cristina Scabbia drew attention, sharing the spotlight with Angela Gossow (and the feminist rebellion she championed in extreme metal), Vibeke Stene , who, as the frontwoman of Tristania , embodied the cult of the fragile and ambiguous Norwegian gothic diva, and also with Tarja Turunen, on her way to becoming the most famous female metal singer in the world. It was a complex team, full of differences, and times were different then too. Despite sharing covers of international and national magazines (I clearly have my own), Scabbia's figure was always the most discreet – just like Lacuna Coil's music. Today, almost 20 years after that memorable past, the band only impresses by remaining active, believing in a format that is still obscure, but certainly domesticated by the industry, the internet, and time.
I could be brief and state the obvious: the first of five shows in Brazil, promoting their latest work, Black Anima , from which they played five tracks. They brought along the American band Uncured , whose young members opened the night with a super modern metal sound, full of references ranging from Avenged Sevenfold and Death , technical death metal bands . The heaviness, the speed, the desire to showcase their skills, and the enjoyable setlist surprised the audience at Bar Opinião. An excellent start. Lacuna Coil played songs from all their albums, and even a cover of "Enjoy the Silence." The fans seemed satisfied, but not much more than that.
review make any difference in Cristina Scabbia's life ? Would someone, among thousands of tickets sold throughout a busy schedule, at the first show of her current tour in Brazil, in the unpopular Porto Alegre – although a more than frequent stop for artists visiting our country – bother to care, go there and point out the mistakes? How would the production company handle it? What kind of fans are we talking about?
As a rule, reviews of metal bands, especially foreign ones, are positive, and this is for quite plausible reasons: besides enthusiastic writers, on stage we usually have serious musicians, working hard, showing creativity, competence and professionalism, night after night for years, perfecting, entertaining, feeding entire masses with something that they reserve a considerable space in their lives just to stop and contemplate, often alone. And this was no different in the case of Lacuna. What was strange during the quintet's long performance is that those present (fans?) didn't seem to be much more than 'merely' entertained. Calling the songs by name didn't seem to remind anyone of anything very specific.
And it didn't help that the three members in corpse paint and 'Slipknot' jumpsuits (I'm referring to the power trio that accompanies the Lacuna vocalists) delivered a clean, well-lit, docile, vaguely enthusiastic performance, executing a rather repetitive series of "one-note grooves," and at the forefront was a vocalist ( Andrea Ferro ) wandering aimlessly, with gestures or vocals that added neither visual nor musical beauty, nor inspired confidence.
Not that people can't be domesticated. That all those who formed a black metal (to take an extreme example), which supported the aesthetic pillars of 'gothic' and 'symphonic' genres, are now family men, avoid gratuitous violence, and even come to embrace the rhetorical nature of their blasphemies, is perfectly acceptable: maturing is still everyone's right. But in my view, going on stage promising metal and giving the audience a job disguised as "heavy music" (emphasis on the quotation marks), with an excess of riffs and a somewhat diffuse identity behind a label of 'alternative metal'...
Yes, the use of the adjective "reticent," and also the ellipses used so far, is intentional – they describe the feeling of the moment, in front of the stage. Understand: the band was doing what they know how to do, and they were doing it competently (although, it's true, they didn't do justice to the album's production). So the problem didn't seem to be with the band, but with the music. Having, in my youth, nurtured a certain interest in bands like After Forever , Nightwish , and Within Temptation , in addition to having dedicated good doses of affection to the classic works of Tristania and Therion , bands that often haunt my life in confused lapses of sympathetic nostalgia, I was frustrated to find nothing of that imagery in the Lacuna Coil show. Worse than that was encountering what, many times, resembled the hits of Evanescence , a band that helped break with the ultra-romantic charm of gothic-metalheads.
Please understand: I know my place, and the reader has the right to disagree with me, to comment that this was the best show of their life, that the musicians have never been so good, that the music has never been so relevant, that the reviews of Black Anima , the album promoted on this tour, were all very good. However, in my opinion, Lacuna Coil offered fewer highlights (rehearsal, beautiful backdrops, and the comforting presence of their vocalist, who even with everything that has been said still enjoys the status of a modern 'metal diva' in front of her many admirers) than the opening band, and here we enter the plot twist of the night (and, as you can see, also of this review).
The band accompanying Lacuna Coil on this tour is Uncured, a much more interesting band than the headliners. More interesting indeed, because at least on February 11th in Porto Alegre, they gave us more to talk about. The story of Uncured's good concert begins with a 19-year-old vocalist and guitarist and a 21-year-old guitarist who also sings: two young brothers, too muscular for their age, and with a very impressive performance (what we call "fucking kids" here in the south of Brazil).
While the sound is heavily influenced by metalcore with clean, catchy melodies, evoking an increasingly caricatured and Americanized sense of teen , this cynical and malicious observation vanishes the moment we remember the age of the musicians mentioned: at the peak of adolescence while touring with major names in world metal since 2017, they are possibly at the peak of the most agonizing dilemmas, playing and singing about it at the right age and, amazingly, elaborating all this on guitars with far more than six strings, oscillating between American - idol vocals and classic thrash/death riffs (the latter performed by the second guitarist, and at least live they sound like that!), and the most fabulous thing of all: distilling, in no uncertain terms and still in a friendly tone, a technical death metal that seems to come from an inexhaustible source of energy (and here age proves relevant once again).
During the show, it was impossible not to think of Alexi Laiho, who released Something Wild with Children Of Bodom before he was 20, but let's be clear that the comparison ends there: they play very well, but their 'intention' is still a bit vague in relation to the cohesion of the Finns' early works. The four guys are from New Jersey, and when I met them at the end of the show, they not only recognized themselves in my astute association with the Finns, but also told me that they had toured with them. That's when I started to get really intrigued: who were these anonymous kids with all that commitment? The band clearly came to leave a strong impression, playing very fast, exploring their instruments fluently and pulling a lot (almost forcing) on charisma. The vocalist didn't skimp on effective and engaging communication with the audience – which he won over song by song –, smiles, and on top of everything, played guitar better than many guys he hasn't even had enough time to listen to yet.
The band didn't leave the stage to a huge acclaim, but for an opening act, their merchandise seemed to be doing very well. In conversation with the guys, they said that the band is their job, that they dedicate themselves exclusively to it, tour and live for it, and yes, they consider it the best job in the world (their words). It was intriguing to observe the quartet behind the sound technicians' booth, watching Lacuna Coil's show, not only as those who have something to learn from the older and more experienced musicians, but also as those who have something to say to them about challenging the audience's attention, their own technical and creative limitations, and above all, the need to give, through art, a response worthy of the present times. This is because Lacuna's show is so "mature" and "professional" that its riffs , grooves , and pseudo-histrionic gutturals in a sea of normality seem to leave everything a bit... meaningless.
In short, except for die-hard Lacuna Coil fans, it might have been a somewhat generic concert, but for the general public, at least it offered the opportunity to experience something truly out of the ordinary: unknown young people giving their all and impressing at first sight. A night marked by dividing the stage at Opinião between the "dream job" for some and "just a job" for others. The good news is that it remains difficult to put on a good metal show, and that not all the experience in the world guarantees that a weak show will go unnoticed.
See below for exclusive photos by Daniela Cony.
