CRADLE OF FILTH — Cruelty and the Beast (review)

CRADLE OF FILTH — Cruelty and the Beast album cover Album · 1998 · Gothic Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
Cruelty and the Beast is in some respects the definitive presentation of Cradle of Filth's musical vision of blackened gothic metal, at least in the sense that it's here that their musical style largely hit the formula they have worked variations on to this day. The concept album tells an extremely fanciful, exaggerated, and romanticised version of the life story of Elizabeth Bathory - heroine of numerous black metal tributes prior to this - which gives the band plenty of scope to pursue their perennial lyrical themes of blasphemy, eroticism, vampirism and Goddess-worship.

The closing Lustmord and Wargasm, a defiant declaration of war on Christianity to avenge Bathory, is the closest the album ever gets to full-on black metal, but for the most part the disc continues down the path of poetic lyrics and liberal use of synthesisers established on Dusk and Her Embrace - albeit the vocals this time around seem to lean further into Dani Filth's various schticks, something which has become a love-it-or-hate it aspect of the band's sound over the years.

At the epic climax of Bathory's story, the band get Ingrid Pitt to do some narration; this is an inspired choice in many ways, since Pitt played a character based on Bathory in Hammer Films' Countess Dracula and Cradle of Filth are in many ways the Hammer Films of extreme metal: yes, they might be tamer than some of their competitors, and yes they can be cheesy, but they offer a blend of fairly tame scares and sexual titillation which is distinctive and unique to them. Cruelty and the Beast illustrates this perfectly. It's certainly a dramatic affair, but it feels like it lacks substance compared to its predecessor.
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