Hard rock

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

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

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Make Status Quo sound like Stockhausen: AC/DC’s Power Up reviewed

Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but you can’t fasten either item of clothing and your teeth have fallen out. Instead you are simply an undignified granddad and everybody knows it. Hell, I’ve been there, over the years, until kindly women intervened. Apparently no women have intervened with guitarist Angus Young. He’s still wearing his short-trousered schoolboy outfit, gurning like a man who has just discovered a kidney stone, at the age of 65. No matter how desperately, inelegantly, you cling to your youth, there’s always Angus to make you look kind of measured. The Aussie-Geordie alliance