The beauty and brilliance of Cradle of Filth
Grade: B+ 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
