With a promise to come back to the Brighton, Lacuna Coil’s Cristiano Mozzati sat down and talked to the Badger about their ‘Trip to the Darkness Tour’ and their upcoming album ‘Dark Adrenaline’, due to be out on 23 January 2012.
How’s the tour going?
This is the first tour after the release of the first album and it’s going great! We’re half way through the tour right and we only have a few shows left and that’s the longest tour we’ve done in the UK. The public is great!
How’s it being back after the break you had?
We’ve been home working on the new album for about a year and this is actually the first tour we do.
Have you been in Brighton before?
No, this is our first time. We walked around a bit as we had a day off. We went to the pub and walked around the town centre. It’s a really nice town.
How would label your sound right now?
That’s a pretty tough question. We always try to incorporate new elements to our music. It’s not a conscious thing, but when you’re writing new things you’re always influenced by stuff that you listen to and that happen around you.
What are you influenced by right now?
Well, many different things. We listen to a lot of different kinds of music. There’s six people in the band so really everybody is going to have their own music taste, etc. We all contribute. This album was mainly written by Marco, our bass player. He was the one who was available the most because we all have stuff going on this past year. I bought a house finally! We all had a few things going on and we really didn’t have a chance to totally focus on the record as we did for ‘Shallow Life’, where everybody came together. The good thing is that at least somebody was there with Andrea and Cristina who write the lyrics.
Are you happy with the outcome?
Absolutely! I think it’s a great album. It’s an album that really turns things around for our fans because I know that some people weren’t really into what we did with ‘Shallow Life’ because they thought we had experimented a bit too much. We do agree with it up to a certain extent. That’s what happens in a band when you want to write new music and you want to move forward. You always need to at least try. If we hadn’t done it we wouldn’t have written an album like ‘Dark Adrenaline’. I think we did something different than they were expecting. I know that from a perspective of die hard fans we should always be playing the same album, over and over again. This works with certain bands, but some other bands you always want to try and do different things to help you develop your style and make things different and interesting for ourselves to play and for our fans to listen to. I think there were some songs in ‘Shallow Life’ that were a bit too different for our fans. And although I think that they were really good songs I can understand why the album could have been a let down for the old-time fans.
So, is ‘Dark Adrenaline’ more like ‘Shallow Life’ or more like your first records ‘Comalies’ or ‘Unleashed Memories’?
I think that a lot of people will be surprised with ‘Dark Adrenaline’. We kept what we thought it was great in ‘Shallow Life’, but mixed it more with a darker style like we had in previous records. It’s the best of both worlds! The reactions we’re having are simply amazing. The reactions are just as good as when we play ‘Heaven’s a Lie’, ‘Our Truth’ or ‘Spellbound’.
Being in the metal industry over ten years now, do you think there’s been a change in the metal scene in general?
There’s been a change for sure. There have been lots of bands coming out and lots of genres developing within the metal itself, in Europe and in the US. There’s a constant change.
Is there anyone or a particular band that attracts you at the moment?
I’m a conservative kind of guy. I like listening to new stuff, but also love to listen to the music that I know. And I like a lot of different stuff. I can listen to Pink Floyd and then I listen to Lamb of Gob. I like what Straight Line Stitch, our support band, are doing is really interesting.
Do you think there’s room for new bands?
I think it’s very complicated nowadays with the Internet and the way you share your music with other people, it becomes easy to get overwhelmed. This can be a good and a bad thing, because people don’t know what to pick as there’s so much stuff out there.
What would you say was one of the most memorable moments in your career?
For sure, when we released ‘Comalies’ back in 2002 that was really the turn around moment. We didn’t think it was going to happen that way. It started like our previous albums: we started touring Europe, here and there, but we then got an offer to support Opeth in the US and that really changed things big time for us. ‘Heaven’s a Lie’ became a huge success. The album was already out in Europe, but it exploded in 2003 in the US and we started to tour massively. We were in the US for months and that was something we didn’t expect it would happen that way. The US became our main market and we tour the US a lot more than anywhere else nowadays.
You’ve worked with Moonspell quite a few times form the very start of your career. Do you keep a close relationship with them?
We try to be in touch as much as we can. Before we were fellow musicians we were really close friends and we have so much fun when we’re on tour together. It’s one of those bands that when we meet at festivals or shows it’s always like a big party. Because we’re all Latin we all laugh, shout and party a lot.
Any chance of working together?
That could very well happen, at any time. There are no plans. They have their own thing going on and we have ours and it’s hard to make sure we can get together as you need a lot of time to be able to do something like this.
What do you expect from the tour with Megadeth in 2012?
We’ve toured with Megadeth before. We know them well. It’s an honour to be on such a tour with metal legends like Motorhead and Megadeth. It’s great that we actually have the chance to be touring with them! I think it’s a great time too, they’re very popular in the States right now and it’s a package that will work very well. Especially in America where I think people are very open minded when it comes to music. They don’t think about whether it’s epic metal, power metal or death metal. People really go and listen to what’s going on and they like to find out about your music. I’m really looking forward to that. Also because we’ll be playing more stuff from the new album ‘Dark Adrenaline’!
