Life is really rather dark and well, gloomy and bleak and, to put it starkly as it were, abominable and doom-laden, isn’t it? I mean, golly, in this burial shroud of a world where every night is Samhain night and Lovecraftian horrors lurk around every corner, wouldn’t it be nice if somebody made music about how utterly blasted and totally hopeless things really are? Well, you can shout “la! la! Cthulhu fhtagn!” my absinthe drinking, underworld pale, smelling slightly of the grave friends—Cradle of Filth to the rescue!
If you’re familiar with the UK sitcom The IT Crowd you’ll know that it was Cradle of Filth that transformed up and coming young executive Richmond Avenal into a Dracula-like Goth banished to working at no job in particular behind a blood red door in the dank basement of Reynholm Industries. In one particularly hilarious episode, he offers a Cradle of Filth CD to a grieving widow at her husband’s funeral, kindly suggesting she listen to track four, “Coffin Fodder,” telling her, “It sounds horrible, but it’s actually quite beautiful.” Well, I tracked down the cut on the extreme metal band’s extremely entertaining sixth studio LP, 2004’s Nymphetamine, and it’s anything but beautiful. But boy does it shred!
Is Nymphetamine a rewarding listen? Do vampires enjoy the taste of human blood? Of course it’s bloody rewarding! The group that Richmond Avenal mildly calls “one of the best contemporary dark wave bands in the world” combines Goth imagery with unadulterated thrash and din to produce the aural equivalent of the damned French poet and dandy Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Dani Filth provides the requisite death wraith vocals; guitarists Paul Allender and “Germs Warfare” (aka James McIlroy) slash away like werewolves making mincemeat of your dear old granny. And “Martin Foul” (aka Martin Powell) adds gloomy atmospherics on keyboards. Add some high-falutin’ choirs of damned souls and what you have is lots of old-fashioned evil fun—I find them hilarious, myself, but on such songs as “Filthy Little Secret,” “Gilded Cunt” (!!), “Coffin Fodder,” “Medusa and Hemlock,” and “Mother of Abominations,” I’ll be damned if Cradle of Filth don’t deliver the extreme metal goods.
Cradle of Filth also do gothic romanticism quite well; the wonderfully titled “Absinthe With Faust” is as lovely and moody as they come, while such tunes as “English Fire,” “Gabrielle,” and “Swansong for a Raven” mix metal with gothic neo-classical flourishes to winning affect. And “Nymphetamine Fix” (which boasts the lovely vocals of Liv Kristine Espanaes Krull), is a symphonic metal delight. Is this the kind of music you’ll want to listen to during your endless tenure in your otherwise silent sepulcher? Damn right it is! It’ll cheer things up no end! And have you doing the dance horizontal for all eternity!
You can slap whatever label you want on Cradle of Filth—black metal, extreme metal, gothic metal, blah blah blah—but the bottom line is that they’re a veritable howl from the grave. Like I said before, they crack me up. But I love a good larf and like I also said before, they deliver the goods. We all need our consolations in this world, and as Richmond Avenal says in The IT Crowd, “Let me tell you, it was good to have the Filth to come home to after another disappointing day.” Are Cradle of Filth a joke? Sure. But they’re a wonderful joke, with one hell—and I mean that literally, all you Goth kids—of a punchline.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
