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These are heady days for those of us who wear our devotion to metal like a badge of honor. The deafening beast of the dark depths has lived to roar and rampage again and the scene has never been in a happier or healthier state. But don't be deceived. Metal never really went away. In fact, its current fortitude stems entirely from the bands that never surrendered those brave, liquor-soaked men whose total disregard for the vagaries of fashion and finance kept them glued to the grindstone through metal's mainstream wilderness years. Now, as seems wholly fitting, the greatest of these are finally reaping their rewards and hitting new creative peaks as they surge unstoppably onwards and upwards. And, as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in 2010....
Just as the gravel-lined, turd-stained streets of urban England gave heavy metal to the world back in the late '60s, so that small country with the big voice continues to be the place where the world's finest dark metal band rest their weary, alcohol-ravaged heads after another sonic killing spree.
Throughout the '90s, Cradle of Filth - led by vocalist, lyricist and crypt-crawling master of ceremonies Dani Filth - beavered tirelessly away, producing a series of peerless extreme metal classics that drew from an endless, dizzying array of inspirations and influences while always maintaining that instantly recognisable heart of filthy darkness. The brutal and brief VEmpire mini-album and the lustrous, lascivious Dusk & Her Embrace (both 1996) began to reveal the band's great sonic range. Later taking into account the slithering concept piece Cruelty & The Beast (1998) and the Clive Barker-inspired Midian (2000) - not to mention their excursions into the visual realm of film and promo - the Cradle Of Filth sound showed itself to be a many-headed creature. It was one that took delight in confounding both the purists and the critics who continually assailed the band's motives and creativity even as their fan base expanded and their status soared. With a line-up that seemed to be constantly changing - thanks, perhaps, to the cobweb-encrusted revolving door that rumours suggest marked the entrance to the band's rehearsal space during this period - the music was never allowed to stagnate fresh blood and its revitalising effects remained a permanent weapon in the boys' macabre arsenal...
And so to 2007, where Cradle Of Filth find themselves in the enviable position of being in a league and class of their own. Having long since outstripped the achievements of their one-time contemporaries, the band is now firmly entrenched in a rich vein of form. The current line-up of Dani Filth, guitarists Paul Allender and Charles Hedger, bassist Dave Pybus, Ashley Ellyllon keyboards and live vocals and drummer Martin Skaroupka is the most solid and powerful in the band's career and Thornography is the resounding, conclusive proof. With songs as brutish, bombastic and diverse as "Libertina Grimm," "Tonight In Flames," "Cemetery & Sundown," "I Am The Thorn," "The Byronic Man" (featuring HIM's Ville Valo on guest vocals) and a deranged cover of Heaven 17's '80s pop gem "Temptation," the world's biggest and best extreme metal band have never sounded so exhilarating, so vital, so venomous.
Louder, harder, faster, heavier, darker, catchier - the unstoppable force that is Cradle Of Filth slithers menacingly forward, crushing the opposition and striking warped, blackened glee into the hearts of misanthropes and malevolents the world over.....
"I teach you the over man. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? ... All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to over man: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The over man is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the over man shall be the meaning of the earth.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and over man—a rope over an abyss ... what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."
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