Lacuna Coil: Apocalypse Now – Not Forever
It’s safe to say that Italy’s LACUNA COIL did not foresee life imitating art when releasing ninth and darkly cinematic offering Black Anima in 2019, yet the very apocalypse they visualised creatively would end up landing on their proverbial doorstep just one year later. Flashback to March 2020 – whilst the rest of the watching world were beginning to see and hear the perturbing news emerging from their native country, the band themselves were riding high having just wrapped a triumphant South American tour. And as co-vocalist Cristina Scabbia divulges to Distorted Sound, it was only on arrival back in Milan – and to scenes of queues of travellers having their temperatures taken – that she and the rest of the band truly grasped the potential severity of the situation at hand.
With everyone in their home region of Lombardia suddenly ordered into a strict and full lockdown, this was now life as nobody had known or experienced it. “We thought it was just going to be a short break to get everything under control you know? And I believe it ended up being like a month and a half. From the start, we decided to just cancel the upcoming tour (South East Asia and Australia) because we just knew then that it was going to be inevitable,” Cristina recounts. “I did actually enjoy that first lockdown in the respect that up until that point we’d been travelling so much that I didn’t even remember what my own house looked like! How normal so-called ‘life’ was. I spent a month and a half waking up whenever I wanted, cooking whenever I wanted and watching movies and playing video games. But then I started to realise that things were not going to change anytime soon – that the numbers were just going higher. I spoke to a lot of friends who were doctors and nurses and they were telling me just how difficult the situation was becoming to handle. I was getting a lot of messages from people outside of Italy who really thought we were in a zombie movie. I was having to talk about how it wasn’t a case of us all just dropping like flies from this virus. And it all just started from there.”
With the music industry pretty much decimated due to Coronavirus, this in turn introduced the concept of bands doing live online streams. LACUNA COIL would follow suit in September 2020. Filmed at Milan’s famed Alcatraz venue, Live From The Apocalypse was not only a performance of an album in its entirety, but the sound of a band channelling the separation and solitude, the confusion and calamities; as life as we knew it was brought to a earth-shattering halt. And with so many music fans starved of the excitement of live shows, they certainly filled what was a considerable void for many. As 2020 progressed, was it a case of “we need to do this for ourselves as much as anyone else” and we need that artistic release now too? “Absolutely yes. We wanted to do something that belonged to our regular life and we just really felt the need to go back to a stage at that point. We decided not to do the stream from our usual rehearsal room or living room. We wanted something organised in a professional way, also because we wanted our crew to work as well and to give them the opportunity. We just wanted to try something we’d never done before,” Cristina states emphatically.
Despite the necessary absence of an audience, when you watch the livesteam there’s a distinct and newfound gravitas to transfixing cuts like Apocalypse and The End Is All I Can See; the latter’s crunching guitars and throat-tearing belligerence taking on new meaning given the show’s catalyst. “Some of the songs in the setlist and on Black Anima are perfectly representative of 2020. And during the show there was this very strange vibe that permeated it but in a weird way the sadness going on mixed with the excitement of going on and performing was empowering in a way. I was the last one left in the dressing room when everything was over because we had to everything really quick – crew had to leave ASAP to not create groups of people. So I’m last there in this venue that’s always super loud and busy and I remember just this feeling of loneliness, of not knowing what would happen the day after, the week, the month after.”
As our conversation draws to a close and Live From The Apocalypse’s release date looms ever closer, we take another step towards what we perceive as our freedom. And there’s just enough time to ask the loquacious vocalist for her thoughts on this uncertain future and whether in fact Black Anima wasn’t just an album but a textbook example of life imitating art – and what we as human beings could lament, and ultimately learn from it. “It’s a very interesting question as we’ve always likened the concept of the dark and obscure and both being linked with one another. We don’t want this darkness to discourage us to see the good things that did happen,” Cristina concludes thoughtfully. “2020 was awful – we lost so many and it was so hard for so many of us. A lot of people lost their jobs and livelihoods. But I want to see it as a sort of reset, to make us realise what’s really fucking important. And to cherish more what we have. I’ve always tried to see and find the good things coming out of the bullshit; and this was another case of that.”
Live From The Apocalypse is out now via Century Media Records.
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