Live Review: Lacuna Coil - Academy, Manchester
Support: Blind Channel
20th October 2024
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Tim Finch
After a day spent wrestling fence panels from the grasp of Storm Ashley, an evening in the presence of Milan’s finest metal export was just what the doctor ordered. Although Ashley is doing its best to spoil everyone’s fun, there’s a healthy turn out early on and the merchandise stand is doing a brisk trade from the get-go.
Finland’s 2021 Eurovision competitors – and sixth place finishers, to give credit where credit is due – Blind Channel have the honour of opening the show tonight and are rewarded by an attentive crowd and a generous stage allocation from the headliners, including a dazzling light show, means the Finns have all their ducks in a row before stepping foot onto the stage.
The house PA plays Linkin Park’s One Step Closer, a foreshadowing of the band’s more accessible and chart-friendly take on Nu metal. From the twin-vocal assault to the PG-13 sense of danger, Blind Channel set about their business in an energetic manner.
Having formed in 2013 and issued five full length albums since their 2016 debut, the six-piece are no slouches when it comes to a work ethic and their frenetic performance shows they have embraced the Nu nostalgia and are running with it
This year’s Exit Emotions album dominated the dozen songs on offer, from the opening duo of Deadzone and Where’s the Exit, with its jump-da-fuck-up moment, to XOXOX’s DJ-centric Hybrid Theory stylings, and on to the obligatory ballad, Die Another Day, complete with mournful cello. Cheesy? Perhaps! Effective? Certainly! The swell of the guitar as the tune grows is manna for the puppy-lovers in the crowd, and the single swear lets us all know Blind Channel can be edgy when they need to be.
Over My Dead Body, from the excellently titled Violent Pop album, shows the Finns aren’t quite as safe as they might seem, a statement echoed in the following tune, We Are No Saints. It was obvious Nu metal would have something of a resurgence, it being almost a generation since its heyday, and the passage of time lets us who were too old for the Nu to, perhaps, re-evaluate it as a genre.
They compare the rap of Violent Bob (Déjà Fu) with the all-out metal attack of the System of a Down cover, B.Y.O.B. and play snippets of Living on a Prayer and Last Resort before a full on Everybody (Backstreet’s Back), which large sections of the crowd seemed, not only to know, but to sing along with. What looked like a good idea at the time, might well turn into regret, recrimination and self-loathing as the cold light of Monday morning reminds them what they’ve done. The horror, the horror.
Newbie Wolves in California and 2022’s Balboa has attempted circle pits, finding some success, before the Backstreet’s Back, leaving just Dark Side, the band’s Eurovision entry to bring the set to an end. While a little bubble-gum at times and rarely dangerous, Blind Channel did manage to get Manchester partying like it was 1999. Mission accomplished.
Sifting through the records deep in the vaults of Razor’s Edge towers, I realise it’s been a whole decade since last I saw Lacuna Coil playing live, at Bloodstock 2014, with Carcass and Emperor. Summer’s announcement of the band’s return to Catton Park was greeted enthusiastically, by which time their Sleepless Empire album, scheduled for a 2025 Valentine’s Day release, should be familiar to most.
Curiously, this tour doesn’t seem to be on the back of any product, other than being thirty-years since the formation, giving Lacuna the opportunity to visit some of their paths less trodden. With the merch line still showing no sign of abating, the lights dim, and the band take the stage to Blood, Tears, Dust.
Chrstina’s early vocal gremlin has gone by the time Reckless’ stomping rhythms come around; Dark Adrenaline’s Trip the Darkness is full of Gothic sensibilities, including the rear-screen projections, giving an uncomfortable feeling.
The combination of Christina and Andrea’s vocal contribution is so finely tuned as to be seamlessly effective, moving through the band’s storied history with ease, going back nearly-twenty years to Karmacode’s classic Our Truth and coming forward to Black Anima’s Layers of Time and Apocalypse.
If Lacuna Coil did have product to promote tonight it might be considered to be the revamp of Comalies, marked with the suffix XX to indicate the twentieth anniversary, and called a “deconstruction and transportation” of those songs for a new time.
Entwined XX finds Lacuna in their more Gothic mode, with Christina emotionally fragile as she lays her heart bare; a slower Heaven’s a Lie XX is played beneath golden lights and attracts a huge singalong, which the first three encores of Aeon XX, Tight Rope XX and, particularly, Swamped XX are all greeted like friends who’ve had a makeover.
Previews of new material come in the guise of In the Mean Time – not a Helmet cover – which will feature an appearance by New Year’s Day’s Ash Costello and the Randy Blythe starring Hosting the Shadow which, even without the Lamb of God frontman’s presence can still be heard as an amalgam of both bands firing at their best.
Lacuna Coil must have joint custody of Enjoy the Silence with Depeche Mode by now – growing up sharing a room with a Depeche Mode-loving older brother meant it took a while to come to terms with hearing this one ever again – and their contribution to the board game soundtrack Zombicide White Death, Never Dawn, brought the main set to a close in a fearsome manner.
Last song of the evening, Nothing Stands in Our Way maintained the high energy levels across the whole performance, ending the set on a high and making us look to the February release of the new record and next summer in a South Derbyshire field.
Christina suggested Manchester was in the best vocal form of the whole tour to date and, bias that I am, I couldn’t help but agree with her.
Photo Credits: Tim Finch Photography
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