‘Let the circus begin!” bellows Cristina Scabbia four songs in, though as Lacuna Coil’s elaborate stage has already been graced by mimes, rope-dancers and a towering, half naked goat-woman hybrid on furry stilt legs, the circus began 20 minutes ago. Tonight is no ordinary Lacuna Coil concert, marking 20 years since the Milanese group began their ascent to the gothic-metal throne. With fans flying in from as far afield as Australia to attend, and a film crew present to capture the celebratory event for a DVD, you can hardly blame them for pushing their entire fleet of boats out for tonight’s show. But while they proudly put the “Grand” into Grand Guignol, they’re also occasionally guilty of overegging their pomp-metal pudding.
Perhaps their desire to put on such a breathtaking show stems from the knowledge that their dual front-persons can be a little static. For while Scabbia, a full-metal-Valkyrie in corsetry and stockings, sings with the vim of a Broadway player and the hands-outstretched intensity of a karaoke queen belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart, she and lava-gargling co-vocalist Andrea Ferro (draped in black, given to dancing and emoting like a tertiary member of East 17 when the mood takes him) mostly deliver their parts as if their feet were welded to the stage, recalling Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé in the video for Barcelona.
The temptation to liven up their presentation, then, must have been impossible to resist, but lengthy passages of interpretive dance, and rope-dancers in Ann Summers angel and devil costumes dangling from the ceiling overshadow the music. Which is, in its own way, impressive, given how much of Lacuna Coil’s catalogue is so gloriously overblown. This band long ago liberated themselves from the stultifying tyrannies of subtlety and taste, juggling metallic riffage and the agonised passion of power balladry so cannily that their songs often suggest a gang of chainsaw-wielding saboteurs bursting into the studio while Céline Dion cuts her latest tearjerker.
On occasion, this unlikely formula delivers brilliance: the wonderful, blitzing assault of Blood, Tears, Dust – tonight enlivened by Scabbia and her hoofers, all dressed as circus ringmasters, dancing with fire – or End of Time, dressing the theatrical anguish with glacial, quasi-symphonic riffage. One Cold Day, written for Claudio Leo, their founding guitarist who died of cancer in 2013, is like While My Guitar Gently Weeps recast as sweeping operatic metal. It’s a triumph. Elsewhere, they can push things too far, as with the overcooked anguish of Falling, which Scabbia delivers tonight in a dress with a vast train that unfurls to the width of the stage while a trapeze slowly lifts her to the ceiling. Their cover of Enjoy the Silence, meanwhile, is a brutish thing, stomping every iota of grace from the Depeche Mode original, as wrenching as discovering the Mona Lisa trodden into cider-soaked rags on the floor of a goth club.
The show concludes with further overdriven lunacy, the dancers wielding fireworks, one turning herself into a human catherine wheel. Too much? After two or so hours of this wild metallic carnival, who even knows? One can almost guarantee, however, that Lacuna Coil will be around to put on a similarly gonzo anniversary party in another decade.
