Comalies

Like the first two albums, the third was made at Woodhouse Studios in Hagen, Germany, with Waldemar Sorychta. The band's own studio report describes ten days of pre-production with Sorychta between Milan and Dortmund, then drums from 17 April, followed by bass, guitars and vocals, with everything on tape in under twenty days, the fastest they had ever worked. Marco Coti Zelati built the basic ideas at home and each member shaped his or her own part; Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro wrote the vocal lines and lyrics, and "Tight Rope" grew out of an idea from guitarist Marco Biazzi. Scabbia has said the band shaped the sound so closely that they all but co-produced it. Scabbia explained the title as the product of a creative burst that felt like working in a coma; "coma" alone seemed to lack something, so they joined it to "lies". The sunflower on the cover was picked from proposals by several artists who had been sent only the logo and the title, and it is credited to Thomas Ewerhard. All thirteen songs are credited to the band, with Coti Zelati on keyboards. The Enhanced CD adds "The Making Of Coma Lies", a film directed and edited by the band and Luigi Sabadini, and a limited box held a digipak with a fourteenth song, "Lost Lullaby". The album reached Italian shops on 23 September 2002 and entered the German albums chart at 45; the American edition followed on 29 October. According to Scabbia, the single "Heaven's a Lie" took off after the radio station WAAF began playing it and more than a hundred American stations followed within days, after which MTV2 asked for a video. Three videos were made for the song; Patric Ullaeus, who directed one of them, also shot "Swamped". In 2004 the band played Ozzfest, and that August the album reached 9 on Independent Albums and 178 on the Billboard 200. "Swamped" was also chosen for the Resident Evil soundtrack. In 2022 the band remade the whole record for its twentieth anniversary as Comalies XX.