The beauty and brilliance of Cradle of Filth

Satan’s devoted groupies Cradle of Filth are back with their shrieking, howling, portentous, Exorcist-style incantations, 30 years after effectively inventing the loser-boy goth-metal offshoot, black metal. They’ve got quite good at it. Rapid-paced minor-chord hard rawk, much as AC/DC might have churned out if someone had shown them some Edgar Allan Poe and told them who Wagner was. Except I’m not sure that AC/DC could manage heavy metal so relentlessly intricate, so utterly precise.

As all the catchy, simple, heavy-metal riffs had been used up by about 1979, Cradle of Filth are forced into considerable complexity, which at times – ironically, in a genre that is largely despised for its musical conservatism – resembles what we used to call math rock. There is a brilliance and invention in the drumming and would you believe it, a certain restraint in the guitars, plus the usual black-mass chorale stuff and swirls of sometimes pompous synths. I am not actually saying I like it, but there is plenty to admire.

There are no tunes as such, but melody seeps out from unexpectedly sweet chord progressions, once the riffing has been got out of the way. Dani Filth, the singer, is, of course, hugely irritating and the lyrics are the usual sub-adolescent mumbo jumbo. But every so often – on the delusional ‘Non Omnis Moriar’ and ‘You Are My Nautilus’, the closest they come to a love song – a certain beauty somehow escapes from the band.

Black metal has remained the same assault of noise as it ever was and so Cradle Filth are now regarded as lightweights. They are all the better for it.