INFECTED RAIN: It’s Time (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

THE next time you feel disenfranchised because the pub you’re at doesn’t serve your favourite brew or the band you like skips the city you live in, try to imagine what life would be like trying to start a metal band in Moldova. With a name that might suggest a fictional country from a bad nineties espionage thriller, Moldova is a small eastern European republic that until only a few years ago was still very much under the long shadow of its former Soviet rulers.

It wasn’t a particularly encouraging environment for a group of young people with their sights set on being a metal band.

“It is almost impossible,” says Elena Cataraga, aka Lena Scissorhands, vocalist with Moldovan band Infected Rain. “The only reason we are where we are is because we are very, very stubborn, hard-working people. It took us a lot of years.”

Before they were announced as Cradle of Filth’s Australian tour partners, I had not heard anything of Infected Rain. Cataraga isn’t completely surprised, even though they’ve been around since 2008.

“That’s not your fault! The fault is that, the country we come from, the country we grew up in and where we created this band, unfortunately doesn’t give a lot of opportunities to youngsters, especially something alternative ‘in the arts’”. She slashes air quotes for emphasis. “If people find out that you do art, they’re like, ‘get a job’. So no one will support you, no one will believe in you, no places to play – almost none at all. You have to rent everything and build your own stage, and it’s very expensive so nobody does it!”

Infected Rain, however, did do it. They struggled during their early years against the bureaucracy of Moldova’s still-Soviet style government, unable to tour outside the country unless it was to neighbouring Romania. Just getting a visa to go that far was a nightmare.

“And to get that visa, it’s very expensive, you need a lot of time to put that paperwork together, go to the embassy and if they feel like it, they will give you the visa for only a week or two. So we had passports full of Romanian visas! We needed visas like that for every single country in Europe.”

The same restrictions also made it impossible for other bands to tour Moldova: “Us metal kids who wanted to see a show, we had to go into Ukraine or Romania.”

The band’s first album was released in 2011, but it took almost a decade before Infected Rain – Cataraga, guitarist Vadim Ojog, drummer Eugene Voluta and more recent recruit Alice Lane on bass – became attached to a label. It was a hard slog of many small steps.

“I learned, based on my own life experiences,” the singer says, “I’m a big believer that, when it’s harder, and you don’t give up, it is going to bring you somewhere. There’s no way around it. We had many times in our career when we asked, ‘OK, what are we going to do now?’ We had to invest our own money here and there, we had car accidents, we had to work … we had a lot going on.”

She’s quick to acknowledge that the road isn’t necessarily easy for any band, regardless of their place of origin.

“I’m sure a lot of bands have their own story, and nothing is easy, no matter where you come from. But,” she says, “we had to keep a job for many years to invest in music, and only after eight or nine years of doing music and touring.”

Their struggle has paid off. Infected Rain is now six albums deep and they’ll be playing across Europe this summer before coming to Australia in September with Cradle of Filth. It’s another dream come true for a band that has beaten the odds.

“I can’t think of a better band to be touring Australia with,” Lena Scissorhands beams. “I really hope that the crowds will like what we do. We can’t wait to come there.”