Cradle Of Filth
Cruelty And The Beast

THE REVIEW

"Dusk... And Her Embrace" and "Cruelty And The Beast" are almost unanimously considered the highest peaks of Cradle Of Filth's works: quite similar in structure, yet they are two very different albums, almost antithetical in terms of atmosphere and the message conveyed: the Dusk's Embrace is the album of the night deities, the cemeteries and forests of the Carpathians, the shadowy castles, and the "reciprocated" vampiric love, in short, an airy and almost "positive" album, a concept album in a rather broad sense, without a real storyline with a beginning and an end as a guiding thread: "Cruelty And The Beast" instead is the album of blood, of raw and naked wickedness, of perversion pushed to the extreme limit: here there is a plot, and the star is Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who, like a true diva, stands out on the cover and throughout the artwork, always and in any case accompanied by blood, the element that saturates the pen of the small great Bard Dani Filth in writing these lyrics of morbid passion and paroxysmal vampirism.

The greatest similarity between "Cruelty And The Beast" and its illustrious predecessor is the presence in the first three spots of the tracklist (excluding the intro) of three suites destined to become true COF classics: the trio "Heaven Torn Asunder"-"Funeral In Carpathia"-"A Gothic Romance" remains unmatched and unmatchable, but these Bathorian counterparts leave little to be desired: "Thirteen Autumns And A Widow", the business card of the bloodthirsty countess, where for the first time in the history of the Cradle of Filth it's the guitars that take the lead, leaving choirs and orchestrations a secondary role, the renowned "Cruelty Brought Thee Orchids": dark, powerful, with well-calibrated melodic openings and time changes demonstrating a technique and compositional perfection worthy of the best Dream Theater, and finally "Beneath The Howling Stars", which bears the heavy task of not being overshadowed by "A Gothic Romance": here the orchestrations return in all their magnificence and splendor, accompanying the voice of the Bard and that of Sarah Jezabel Deva in some melodic glimpses of sublime beauty suspended between "Dusk" and "Midian", thus giving life to one of the highest and most powerful expressions of the Filthy Honeymoon. From here on, the album definitively breaks away from its predecessor's thread and takes a final turn towards the gruesome abysses of Bathory's cruelty: two minutes and twenty seconds, that's the duration of "Venus In Fear": soft and hypnotic orchestrations, the voluptuous gasps of the Countess, and the terrified screams of the victims: to this day, this instrumental interlude remains the rawest, most violent, and explicit episode in all of Cradle Of Filth's work, which gives way to the escalation leading to the absolute peak of "Cruelty And The Beast": "Desire In Violent Overture", with its granite riffs and pounding drums, and "The Twisted Nails Of Faith", with its reverberated and distorted attack, preluding to the end of Elizabeth's days, which comes with the quintessential Filthian suite: "Bathory Aria", 11 minutes of grand melancholy and melancholic grandeur, a marvel that starts as a serenade by moonlight and ends with the Countess's epitaph, which flows into the sublime funeral march "Portrait Of The Dead Countess": here ends the earthly story of Elizabeth Bathory, but the moral, the message that Cradle Of Filth wants to convey with this album is that evil and cruelty are nevertheless inherent in human nature, and therefore "monsters", like Elizabeth Bathory or Gilles de Rais are destined to live forever in memories and legends; hence  the album closes with the solid and dazzling ride "Lustmord And Wargasm", which with its untamed sonic force consigns the deeds and legend of Elizabeth Bathory to posterity, destined to live eternally.

"Cruelty And The Beast" is, along with its DeRaisian alter ego "Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder" and "Damnation And A Day" the most challenging album of the Cradle of Filth, which requires time and patience to be fully understood in all its arduous and dramatic power. "Dusk... And Her Embrace" and "Midian" are in my opinion a bit more complete and representative of Cradle's eclecticism, but songs like "Beneath The Howling Stars" and "Bathory Aria" are rightly considered as some of the greatest masterpieces of a band that deserves much more respect and consideration from the critics and the public, because being able to write lyrics like those of Dani Filth and enriching the sound with always new and captivating elements, in some cases even more catchy and accessible doesn't mean being posers, it means being light years ahead of the (poor) average of this genre, and it is known that talent inevitably arouses envy. In any case, better the Cradle of Filth, capable of creating a bit of healthy disconcert, for instance with the cover of "Temptation" rather than the various other groups (I will refrain from naming names) that for twenty years have been serving us the same nonsense, each time increasingly embarrassing and disheartening.