Album Review: Cradle of Filth - The Screaming Of The Valkyries
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Love ‘em or hate ‘em but no one can deny Cradle of Filth’s importance to extreme music and the wider UK music scene as a whole; they are, whether they like it or not, National Treasures and should probably have the appropriate protection afforded to them. There’s also no denying that a new Cradle of Filth album is an event, especially as the previous two-year cycle seems to have started stretching out to four.
After the excesses of Existence is Futile in 2021, Dani and company have made one of their more understated records. In the same way the bombast and overwrought nature of Damnation and a Day and Nymphetamine lead to Thornography, and The Manticore and Other Horrors arrived on the heels of Darkly, Darkly Venus Avera, so The Screaming of the Valkyries eschews many of Existence’s elaborations and is the more stripped back version of Cradle.
Of course, it’s all relative – so stripped back for Cradle of Filth is still more bombast and theatrics than many bands manage in their whole career.
Trends may come and go, but the driving factors behind Dani doesn’t seem to have changed much since the emergence of their Principle of Evil Made Flesh debut in 1994. The intervening years have produced a further dozen albums, with Screaming… being full-length number 14, but the mission statement has never altered.
Opener – and current single – To Live Deliciously opens with Satanic chanting and some stark strings before dropping almost immediately into a trademark Cradle blitz. Guitar swirl and soar, grind and blast as required, all underpinned by Zoe Marie Federoff’s timeless keys. The repeated references to the Golden Dawn lead me to think there’s a hint of Crowley about this tune.
The developing guitar partnership of ten-year veteran Marek Šmerda and new(ish) Donny Burbage is some of the most compatible playing the band had seen. The Trinity of Shadows’ Eighties influenced progression benefits from a conversational dual guitar presence; White Hellebore has some of Cradle’s most directly heavy metal moments, big and bold riffs dominate this love letter to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
As does the Maiden-style bridges of You Are My Nautilus, blending classic metal with those trademark gothic overtones.
The combination of Zoe’s gothic keys and her haunting voice give Screaming… the sense of being somehow timeless. Her baroque piano lines at the beginning of Demagoguery, along with that song’s orchestral interlude, offers the kind of dark beauty only Cradle of Filth do this well. Non Omnis Moriar is the most overtly tragic the band have been in many a long year: mournful and restrained, the temptation to unleash the typical Cradle tirade must have been overwhelming, but by not doing so, Non Omnis… becomes more memorable and feels like a natural successor to Nymphetamie Fix itself.
Thirty-odd years of such vocal chord abuse may have meant Dani is having to recraft his writing to accommodate the changes in his voice. Those divisive high-pitched screams are fewer here than on previous records, through the songwriting is done in such a way as to obfuscate their need. The obvious influence of ex-Sabbat/ Skyclad singer, Martin Walkyier is undoubtably present on the thrashing White Hellebore; the barely concealed gothic menace of many-a-Victorian penny dreadful’s villainous antagonist pepper the narration throughout.
Other than Mr Filth, the rhythm section are the longest serving members of the band, with bassist Danny Firth having been present since Manticore and drummer Martin Škaroupka going all the way back to the Thornography-era.
First single, Malignant Perfection showed a more restrained version of the band on a song that is a natural successor to Her Ghost in the Fog. Ex Sanguine Draculae is the darkest song on Screaming… and the one that you would play to someone who wanted a seven-minute crash course in the history of the band.
Leaving just the coda of When Misery Was a Stranger’s gothic metal stylings, blending rampaging drums with melodic breaks to close The Screaming of the Valkyries to a fitting conclusion.
It’s far too early to see where this record will sit in the overall pantheon of Cradle releases; Midian remains my personal favourite, with Darkly Darkly… coming in second. It must be said that for a band this deep into their career Cradle of Filth are still producing some of their finest material: I would argue that both Hammer of the Witches from 2015 and 2017’s Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness of Decay are among the band’s best works.
Where Screaming… will appears on those lists is anyone’s guess at this stage, but these nine songs are giving it ample chance to be quite high up when the final reckoning comes.
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