ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAY 23, 2007
By Steve Newton
The latest issue of Revolver screams: “The Hottest Chicks in Metal!”, and the female pulchritude displayed on the cover makes it clear that the world’s loudest rock magazine has targeted the Maxim demographic. Marta Peterson of Bleeding Through and Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil are shown lounging about in full-on cathouse garb.
The singer-as-sexpot layout doesn’t faze Lacuna Coil guitarist Cristiano Migliore, who’s fine with the fact that his band’s sexiest member gets all the glory.
“When a band that plays metal or rock has a girl singing in it, everybody’s very curious,” he points out, on the line from a South Carolina stop on the Hottest Chicks in Metal tour. “Obviously the press has always been very attentive, and they ask to talk to her a lot, but it doesn’t really bother us. In the beginning it was harder, because all the attention was on her, but it’s changed a lot because people actually realized that there’s more behind the image–there’s good music and a band that needs each other to accomplish what we’re doing.
“So I think it’s totally cool and normal that she’s always the centre of attention. When a magazine like Revolver covers the hottest chicks of metal, of course you’re gonna have Cristina on the cover; you cannot put me or Andrea or Marco there.”
It’s doubtful that Migliore or any of his four male bandmates–covocalist Andrea Ferro, bassist-keyboardist Marco Coti Zelati, lead guitarist Marco Biazzi, and drummer Cristiano Mozzati–would be nearly as fetching in the red leather dress and black stiletto heels that Scabbia dons on the Revolver cover. Although the voluptuous singer is the group’s obvious focal point, the fact that she and Ferro share lead vocals helps set the sextet apart from the hordes of metal acts vying for the spotlight.
“At first Marco and Andrea brought Cristina into the band because they wanted to have some backing vocals,” explains Migliore, “but it sounded so good that they just thought, ‘Oh wow, let’s have her as a lead singer as well.’ In the end we found the right formula for our band.”
In its formative days in the late 1990s, Lacuna Coil–which has so far released two EPs and four CDs, including its latest full-length offering, Karmacode–played up the goth angle that has paid dividends for bands like Evanescence. But according to Migliore, the group’s death-doom aspect has diminished over time.
“When we started it was nearly 10 years ago,” he says, “and of course we were listening to [darker] bands like the Gathering and Paradise Lost. So obviously it influenced our music, but I wouldn’t call us gothic-metal, or anything like that, anymore.”
Karmacode is actually more prog-metal than anything else; its intense yet melodic vibe recalls Queensrÿche’s adventurous Operation: Mindcrime.
“We learned to improve our songwriting throughout the years,” says Migliore, whose band plays the Croatian Cultural Centre on May 28. “If you listen to Karmacode, I wouldn’t say that we’ve softened up; it’s probably the heaviest album we’ve ever written. But it’s also, as you say, accessible because of the way we write. Even when we have really heavy guitars, or very heavy music, we try to write songs in a way that people can recognize the chorus or the verse or whatever.”
While things have gone well for Lacuna Coil in recent years, with increased CD sales and appearances on prestigious metal tours like Ozzfest, the band has had to overcome its share of adversity. For one thing, it hails from Milan, Italy, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of ear-bustin’ sounds.
“In Italy rock is not very popular,” notes Migliore. “I mean, it’s not part of the culture. There is a big underground scene, but melodic Italian music is the most popular music you can listen to there, so when a band like us tries to come out and play, it’s really hard. That’s also why we actually got bigger abroad before we made it in Italy. We had to come all the way to the United States to become popular, and then after that Italy discovered us.”
At their upcoming Vancouver show, the three groups on the bill with Lacuna Coil are fronted by female vocalists, so don’t be surprised if your view of the stage gets blocked by hot-chick-seeking shutterbugs freelancing for Revolver.
To hear the full audio of my 2007 interview with Cristiano Migliore subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 650 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with:
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