Along with Opeth, Lacuna Coil are another of my absolute favourite bands and I was extremely excited last year when I saw that they were touring here again, since they haven’t been out since 2016 when I last saw them. Prior to that I saw them (twice) in 2007, then 2008, and 2009, and I believe that’s been the entirety of their Australian presence.

They played at Liberty Hall which is at Moore Park, which used to be an absolutely shit location to get to but with the advent of the light rail it’s an absolute breeze now! It’s all of two stops from Central and the trams run super-frequently.

I’ve been to the Hordern Pavilion at Moore Park a couple of times for other shows but haven’t been to Liberty Hall before, and it was a fair bit smaller than I was expecting. It was a fine location though, and I was significantly closer to the stage than I was at Opeth. 😛

This was also one of the very few concerts I’ve been to that hasn’t been just me seeing the band by myself, I met up with @damonism who made the trip up from Canberra for it!

The opening band was Future Static who are from Melbourne, and they have two women, one on lead vocals and the other on bass plus backing vocals, and I’m always endlessly impressed by anyone who can sing and play bass at the same time! They were quite good, and unlike Opeth’s opening band Caligula’s Horse, they actually have their songs for sale on Bandcamp instead of their page being an empty placeholder. 😛

Lacuna Coil came on bang on 9pm and played for not quite an hour and a half. I was delighted that they played two of my absolute favourite songs of theirs (Kill The Light from their Dark Adrenaline album and Spellbound from Shallow Life), and man can Cristina Scabbia still belt it out. She hits these notes in some of their songs that are just so crystal clear and pure that the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! I also had completely missed that they had a new album release last year oops, so a few of the songs weren’t familiar to me.

As with at Opeth, and Heilung before that, I took a bunch of photos in RAW format on my phone and processed them this morning, very happy with how they’ve turned out. These are my favourite ones, the full set is on Flickr.

And just for giggles, compare these to my absolutely garbage photos of when I saw them in 2007. 😅 Obviously technology has come a long way since then but man, I didn’t even straighten them or ditch the utterly blurry photos.

Opeth are one of my all-time favourite bands, I first saw them back in 2003 and have seen them… uh… probably six? times since then, though not since 2013 when we moved to our house and it became more of a pain getting home late at night. With the advent of the Metro now it’s significantly easier, at least as long as you’re going in the general area of somewhere that’s serviced by the Metro, and so I leapt on the tickets when they went on sale for Opeth’s show at the Sydney Opera House. It’s a slightly odd venue for a metal show because it’s all seating, though the seats do that flipping-up thing you get in movie theatres (I appreciated the seating because I’m an old 😛), but the sound and the lighting were excellent.

I arrived pretty much bang-on 8pm when the opening band was starting, and missed the first half of their set because I was waiting in the merch line to get a tour shirt, but the last couple of songs that I was in the concert hall for were really good. The band is called Caligula’s Horse though irritatingly they have a Bandcamp page with absolutely nothing on it. They’ve got a kind of epic prog metal thing going on, so definitely check them out if that’s up your alley.

Opeth came on right on schedule at about 9:10pm which was a nice change from things running late. I’ve seen a few bands that were just boring as hell on stage, where the vocalist doesn’t interact with the crowd (looking at you, Megadeth), but the frontman from Opeth is thankfully very much not in that vein, and I’d forgotten how hilarious he is, he’s got a very dry sense of humour. Some choice quotes follow:

Encouraging the crowd to sing along to To Rid The Disease (one of the songs off their Damnation album, the whole album doesn’t have any growling):

Feel free to sing along!

…the lyrics are a bit shit, it’s because we’re Swedish. Just correct the grammar and sing along!

On the fact that the track names on their latest album (with the exception of the last track) are named “§1”, “§2”, “§3”, etc:

We had the record labels come to us to ask how people are meant to find the tracks on Spotify given when they’re named like that.

I don’t care! We’re not naming our tracks based on how easy they are to find on fucking Spotify!

On the fact that the crowd was sitting:

I’m an awful concert-goer, I’ll always sit down. For us playing here, it’s better if you stand.

But if it was me, I’d sit.

Towards the end of the show when he was doing the giving a shoutout for each band member:

And we have a youngster on drums, Waltteri Väyrynen! He’s 30. 31? He was born the same year we put out our first record.

It hurts.

The setlist was interesting, there weren’t any songs off their most proggy mid-era albums. The Devil’s Orchard from their Heritage album is probably the closest, that album was definitely where they really started veering into prog, but I think it’s also probably the heaviest song from the album.

1. §1 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
2. Master’s Apprentices (Deliverance, 2002)
3. The Leper Affinity (Blackwater Park, 2001)
4. §7 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
5. The Devil’s Orchard (Heritage, 2011)
6. To Rid the Disease (Damnation, 2003)
7. The Grand Conjuration (Ghost Reveries, 2005)
8. §3 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
9. Demon of the Fall (My Arms, Your Hearse, 1998)
10. Ghost of Perdition (Ghost Reveries, 2005)
11. Deliverance (Deliverance, 2002)

The last track there was the encore, and I’ve definitely seen them play that on multiple prior occasions as the encore final track, and man is it an excellent song to finish on!

As with Heilung in 2023, I was able to get some pretty decent photos (though a straight-up metal band is less of a theatrical spectacle compared to Heilung!) and with the improvements in my iPhone 16 Pro I didn’t even need to run them through any denoising. These are my favourite shots, the full set is on Flickr.