The one and only concession I will make to any Cradle of Filth haters out there in the course of this review is that a pretty decent burn on Dani Filth’s get-up in the promo photo for the Filthlings ca. 2025 would be to call him “Jackoff Skellington.” If you’re out there clutching your pearls already, please know that I write from the perspective of a person who thinks that Cradle of Filth is, unambiguously, a Very Good Band.
Back in January (for our most-anticipated-albums article), I wrote that “[p]erhaps my favorite thing… about Cradle of Filth is that they just keep doing the damn thing.” This might seem like backhanded praise, but I don’t mean it that way. Think of it like this: in a lot of ways, Cradle of Filth can’t win. Black metal snobs sneer. Power metal fans scoff. Trad metal ‘heads fold their arms. Goths take a sit-down bath. From every subgenre whose boundaries they straddle, Cradle of Filth seems to evoke passionate disdain. But from my vantage, this means that in all the ways that matter, Cradle of Filth can’t lose. They play sophisticated Teflon metal exclusively.
Hello and welcome, and my goodness haven’t we beaten around the bush. The order of the day is to tell you that The Screaming of the Valkyries, the 14th album from Cradle of Filth, is just downright wonderful. Since 2021’s Existence is Futile, Cradle’s ranks have had a bit of reshuffling, with the addition of new second guitarist Donny Burbage and new keyboardist/vocalist Zoe Federoff. But despite these personnel changes, Screaming of the Valkyries is almost wholly in line with Cradle’s recent stylistic direction. This means that the album is punchy, flamboyant, and dripping with swagger, still sitting in a burnished middle ground where black metal, traditional metal thunder, and modern extreme metal meet.
But perhaps more so than ANY other Cradle of Filth album to date, this one is absolutely stacked – from root cellar to rafters – with guitar pyrotechnics. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re talking fucking incredible guitarwork all across this bad bitch. Tightly coiled, thrashy blackened riffing, plaintively beautiful leads, clean, spiralling solos, and tandem guitar licks explode everywhere from new axe Burbage and relative veteran Ashok (now on his fourth album with the band, and continuing to bring the heat that he injected into the band with Hammer of the Witches). Better yet, all those flashes and runs are deployed smartly in service of a batch of nine intricate yet memorable songs. The album opens with the fist-pumping, crowd-pleasing churn of “To Live Deliciously,” for example. Later on, “Malignant Perfection” opens with a bit of “Her Ghost in the Fog”-like setting but soon takes knottier turns and lands on a delightfully catchy chorus. And there’s an awesome section of guitar interplay that kicks off halfway through “The Trinity of Shadows,” starting off as a restrained single arpeggio lead before being joined by a harmony line, and then eventually spilling out into fierce soloing.
I’ve been reading Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music (2006) recently, and in it he reports that “John Lennon said that the essence of rock and roll songwriting for him was to ‘Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme, and put a backbeat on it’” (p. 66). I suppose I can’t really claim that Dani Filth’s lyrics are “simple” English, but otherwise? Imagine all the Cradle / writing rock and rollllll. What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong for 30 years, and instead of black glam symphonic goth whatever metal, this is just goddamn rock and roll? And really, what else could it be, this music that is so committed to spectacle and volume, to a kind of deadly serious tongue-in-cheek silliness?
New keyboard play Zoe Federoff adds a particularly rich layer with her voice on the impossibly catchy “White Hellebore,” reintroducing some of the old-time gothic flair with a more symphonic tone. She also elevates one of the album’s true standout tunes, “Non Omnis Moriar.” It’s an achingly gorgeous ballad based on a line from the Roman poet Horace’s Odes. In the translation Dani Filth uses, non omnis moriar means “Not all of me shall die.” Horace’s original poem, funnily enough, is a dick-swinging bit about how great his poetry is and how it will live forever. In Cradle of Filth’s rendering, it becomes part of a poignant message about the endurance of love after death (which you can read as vampirically or naturalistically as you are so inclined). The lyrics here also eventually more or less turn into the famous Irish ballad (ahem) “Dani Boy” (“Plant a tree deep upon my silent grave / Think of me in spring’s embrace, when sadness lingers”). Musically, it’s pretty much perfect. If you listen especially closely with headphones, the pre-chorus and chorus – which are already rapturous enough – are peppered with a beautifully understated but intricate duet of guitar and keyboards playing in unison. (The emotional impact of this duet is heightened by the knowledge that Zoe Federoff and Ashok are a recently married couple.)
I can’t pretend not to know that many people (no-fun humbugs, all) find Dani Filth’s vocals to be the main stumbling block to enjoying Cradle of Filth. I have never felt that way myself, but I do think that on these last several albums, he has found greater power in embracing different registers and techniques. Much of this is natural adjustment to the way our voices change as we age, but in practical terms this means there is far less of the extremely shrill rapid-fire vocals of Cradle’s early days. And for those of us who’ve been with this band a long time, it’s a joy to hear him find new rhythms and cadences, often slowing his pace down and playfully pushing lines across bars, stretching things out or tumbling through to fit the music. It’s certainly not improvisational, but there’s an added feeling of thoughtfulness to his delivery in many places.
But if you still can’t hang with the voice, have I mentioned these zip-zapping guitars? The back half of “You Are My Nautilus” has a particularly fiery section of guitar solos from both players, and elsewhere “Ex Sanguine Draculae” comes in with a heavy, stomping doom pace. The latter song quickly morphs, however, into the most Cruelty and the Beast-ish tune of the album (especially in Marthus’s drums, which truly rival prime Nick Barker on the track). The album closer “When Misery Was a Stranger” features a set of deeply emotive guitar solos around the three-minute mark, which help to underscore the haunting, elegiac content of the song, which is hard to read as anything other than a reflection on the seemingly boundless shittiness of the state of the world right now: “The present is fraught / With all-besieging danger.” And further: “This golden age of wonder / Is undone before the thunder / Of another tyrant smitten with his gains.”
Probably you don’t need your heavy metal to be either strict escapism or moralistic hectoring, and this is neither. But if old-ass dead Horace can still wave his personal phorum around, and countless Neros can be seen at every turn fiddling while every would-be Rome burns, maybe we all need the harlequins, the jesters, the fools, wrapping the hardest truths in the slyest smiles.
