Style: extreme gothic metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: vampirism, the darker side of life, romance, sex
Thoughts: Cradle of Filth... what a band this is. They are another pivotal band in my musical taste towards the extreme side. In the late 90's I was starting to foray into the more extreme side of music thanks largely to melodic death metal. I had heard from multiple people that Cradle was a great band to get into for melodic black metal... so I did.
Dusk and Her Embrace was my first exposure to the band. I was completely enamored by the music. It was dark in a way that I had never heard before. It was faster than anything I had ever heard in the past, more extreme. Then there were the vocals.
Dani is the very definition of acquired taste. While his lows are standard fare for extreme metal, his screech is unlike any other vocalist I've ever heard. They are one of the main things that people point to when having trouble getting into the band, and I whole heatedly agree. They were a huge impetus for me getting into the band fully for a bit of time. Once they clicked tho, it was off to the races. They quickly became one of my favorite bands for several years... until they weren't.
As with so many 80's and 90's bands they stray from what made them great. Cradle was no different, they started experimenting with more commercial song structures and leaned more into the sexuality than ever before. They became more gothic metal with odd vocals than anything extreme by the time Nyphetamine came around.
Right around this same time I stopped listening... and I did so for a very long time. I skipped multiple albums and it wasn't until people started talking about how Cradle had returned to form with Hammer of the Witches that I started taking notice again. While that album was absolutely killer I wondered what came before? When did this revival start? Well that seems to have been around the time of Darkly Darkly Venus Aversa.
The first time I heard this album I was pleasantly surprised. There was an intensity to the music that I hadn't heard from the band in ages. While it didn't have the keyboard interludes, that didn't really matter nearly as much as the songs on here sounded more like vintage Cradle than anything I could remember in recent memory.
The band has dropped the verse chorus stylings of their lesser albums, they also dropped the full orchestra that they were experimenting with briefly as well. This is now purely a sextet with all of the "orchestral" elements handled by keyboards... as it should be.
In their place we have some truly "Cradle" sounding songs. The songs are back to a linear song structure and are way more intense than anything I remember them producing before I dropped off. There are heavy riffs, blast beats, and Dani is in top form here. It's not quite vintage Cradle but it certainly sounds a hell of a lot better than what I remembered.
Darkly Darkly Venus Aversa is a Cradle of Filth album. I mean that in the best way possible. There is nothing on here that is revolutionary, BUT it does sound like Cradle. They have dropped all the junk that made them nearly unlistenable and have brought back the bread and butter of their sound. Albums like this show that even bands that are "lost" at some point in their career can still come back to what made them great eventually.
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