Headbangers who like their heavy metal served up loud with a healthy dose of testosterone have a chance to sample something exotic at Ozzfest, the annual concert roadshow for the black T-shirt crowd.
Ozzfest co-founder Ozzy Osbourne and his band Black Sabbath head the lineup, along with Judas Priest and Slayer. A second stage features developing acts, including Lacuna Coil, a band that stands out from the pack by virtue of hailing from Italy and featuring a female singer.
While Italy is hardly a bastion of hard rock music, and women are a rarity in the genre, Lacuna Coil is no Gucci-wearing, pop-flavored novelty act. And any similarities with Evanescence, the Grammy-winning rock band that also features a female vocalist, are purely superficial.
Formed in Milan in 1996, Lacuna Coil (meaning “empty spiral”) considers itself “a mixture between Gothic, rock and metal, with a modern touch,” according to Cristina Scabbia, who shares vocal chores with her male counterpart, Andrea Ferro.
Apparently a favorite of Osbourne’s daughter, Kelly, the six-piece band is touring in support of its third album, ”Comalies” (Century Media Records), which has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States, a sizable sum for a relatively unknown act.
Before Ozzfest kicked off its eight-week run July 10 in Hartford, Connecticut, Lacuna Coil spent seven weeks opening for Christian rock band P.O.D.
An alluring, dark-haired beauty, Scabbia is the inevitable focal point on stage but is wary of capitalizing too much on her sex appeal. She dresses conservatively, leaving more to the imagination of her audience.
“You can be sexy without being vulgar,” Scabbia, 32, said in a recent interview with Reuters. “You don’t need to show your boobs but you can be sexy with your eyes. You can be sexy with your mouth.”
Next big thing?While Lacuna Coil could be on the cusp of a major breakthrough, Scabbia is in no rush to become a big rock star.
“Since the beginning, we’re staying all the time with our feet on the ground and concentrating on the music, without caring too much whether we’re going to be the next big thing. We don’t care. If people love our music, it’s good.”
Tunes such as “Heaven’s a Lie” and “Swamped” showcase the band’s penchant for riff-heavy anthems laced with lyrics about despair and decay. Apart from the title track, “Comalies” is sung in English, and most Italian fans are surprised to learn that Lacuna Coil is home-grown, Scabbia says.
Across Europe, metal is split into distinct sub-genres, such as power metal, epic metal, death metal, rock metal and punk metal. Few fans would dare to stray from their chosen genre. Lacuna Coil, with a style that is hard to categorize, manages to appeal to a diverse crowd, especially in America, where pop music hasn’t quite become so heavily categorized.
It doesn’t hurt that virtually everyone in America seems to claim some kind of Italian ancestry, even if they cannot locate the old country on a map.
“Every time we say we are Italians, everybody says, ’Oh, are you from Brooklyn?’ We say, ’No, we are real Italians. We live there,”’ Scabbia says. “It’s kind of a weird thing to be 100 percent Italian proposing this kind of music, but they just embraced us because they say, ’Oh! They’re Italians. I have Italy in my heart.”’