HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Comalies – Lacuna Coil
If you watched MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball in the early 2000s, you’re old. But more importantly, you definitely would’ve seen a video for a song by an at the time, somewhat unknown band. That song was Heaven’s A Lie; the album 2002’s Comalies, the third album by gothic metallers LACUNA COIL. Milan, Italy isn’t exactly known for its metal and arguably, still isn’t, with the band remaining its biggest modern musical export. While their previous albums had clearly owed more than a little to doom metal luminaries PARADISE LOST, Comalies saw the band step out of their shadow and craft an album that not only changed their lives, but the lives – arguably – of millions of people globally, who became metal fans because of it.
It’s difficult to understate just how much it changed things; it put LACUNA COIL firmly on the map, where they’ve remained as gothic metal stalwarts for twenty years, inspired a whole host of bands who attempted to follow in their footsteps and more. All the while, they refused to rest on their laurels and over the years, have steadily continued to evolve and grow. To celebrate its anniversary, we spoke to vocalist Andrea Ferro to shed light on both what it did for them, and their choice to rework the album from the ground up for Comalies XX.
“It was a different world twenty years ago. Back then, there was barely any internet, everything was done by going into our practice room with demos recorded at home, then developing them together,” he remembers of how they approached its creation. At the time, they were an unknown band from Milan and never expected the impact they’d have; “you don’t think you will ever have this kind of power or importance,” he reminisces. “Comalies is the album that really established our sound for the very first time; you could tell it wasn’t sounding like something else.”
When Comalies was released on October 28, 2002, it wasn’t an overnight change; but there were definite signs of the band picking up steam. For starters, the almost-unheard of was happening; American radio stations wanted to play them. “There wasn’t much history of bands from Milano having international success, or having singles on the radio in America.” Regardless of their expectations, it went on to become the best selling album on Century Media Records, the label they’ve remained with to this day. “It sold like three times the previous best-selling record,” he recalls, still sounding incredulous.
From Heaven’s A Lie seeing so much radio airplay, the band’s stature rose rapidly and they even found themselves on the legendary Ozzfest bill, as well as touring with TYPE O NEGATIVE, a huge influence on them, as well as ANTHRAX. Around that time, MTV requested a video for the single; something you didn’t just have lying around back then, but they managed to put together and it saw heavy rotation.
Over the years though, as their line-up changed and sound evolved to reflect both that and the “more extreme times” they found themselves living through, as much as the gratitude remained, they started noticing things they might’ve done differently now, and seeds were sown. When it came time to consider its 20th anniversary, they immediately discounted a remaster and instead opted to pay homage to it a different way; they wanted to reimagine Comalies for 2022, and how it would sound if they wrote it today.
“It was an interesting experience and experiment,” he says of the reworking. “When we went back to listen to the original music, we don’t have the original files because it was recorded in analogue. So we had to, very accurately, listen to and reproduce what we heard.” They didn’t want to simply keep the songs as they were with a slight change in sound; they ended up rearranging songs, changing them, but not the point of being unrecognisable. “Obviously the most difficult part has been to understand how much you can change without making a different song,” he smirks. “It’s a delicate point where you cover your own songs. Will people still get it? Will they know what song it is?”
Another unexpected result was, “we realised why people loved it so much. The atmosphere, the melodies and arrangements, we appreciated them even more,” he explains. That deep dive into their own work, rather than ensuring it was set-ready, gave them a chance to understand why songs like the title track, Tight Rope or Swamped are so revered; their sweeping gothic melodrama, skyscraper choruses and duelling vocals are now a trope in their own right, but nobody quite did it quite the same as LACUNA COIL did twenty years ago.
So what does legacy really mean? For an album that launched their careers, LACUNA COIL still hold it very close to their hearts, as does every person whose life it changed when they first heard it. But they’re not blind to its perceived imperfections, either; “there’s a mood for Comalies 2002, and there’s a mood for Comalies XX in 2022,” Ferro tells us. That’s why they’re packaging both together with physical editions of XX, making clear this is still very much that same album, just with a shift in atmosphere to the more modern, extreme world LACUNA COIL find themselves in today. But make no doubt about it, Comalies changed the heavy music landscape and millions of lives and made gothic metal the genre it is today. That’s no mean feat.
Comalies was originally released on October 28th, 2002 via Century Media Records.
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