Review Summary: Here there be monsters
Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa put me in such a foul mood following its release I stopped listening to Cradle of Filth altogether for years. This was painful for me, a card-carrying Cradle crusader, especially considering the huge influence the band had on my musical tastes in the years prior. Without them I maybe wouldn't have been inducted into the metal crowd, and I certainly wouldn't have been such an insufferable edgelord in my teenage years either. When The Manticore And Other Horrors released, I listened once and immediately decried it as a further tumble into irrelevancy; it smacked of an established band attempting to reforge their brand with a hammer of nostalgia and an anvil made of Wensleydale. The orchestral aspects felt too try-hard, Dani Filth's pained yelping sounded like he was straining to push out a troublesome poo, and the songs felt comically overinflated and reliant on one singular riff per composition. Needless to say, I was still incredibly butthurt over Darkly being a stodgy, tepid mess. However, after the dust had settled and I'd licked my wounds enough, I returned to Manticore and tried to give it a fair, openminded listen, which led to a mild revelation. The one silver lining to Darkly, Darkly Venus Aversa's painful existence was that CoF couldn't possibly get any worse. They'd descended the ladder to the very depths; if they tunnelled any further down they'd fall off this plane of existence. My first impression of Manticore was soured to an unreasonable degree by the bitter aftertaste left by Darkly, but upon returning to it, I'm prepared to eat the pie of humility. The Manticore And Other Horrors is good. Very good, in fact. Having coated the ladder in grease during their scramble downward to the pits of Darkly, Dani Filth and his crew of misanthropes start the slow scramble upward back toward respectability, and during their stay in the mire, it appears they've recovered some musical aspects once thought lost.
First things first, this album is cheese personified. It's camembert decorated with cheesestrings served in a 50kg hollowed-out babybel. And that's alright. One of the defining characteristics, and one of the biggest shortcomings, of the Midian-Darkly era of Cradle is that they took themselves so damn seriously. Of course, on the initial three CoF full-lengths they also took themselves seriously, but they had the atmosphere and musical chops to back up this grimacing severity. The comparatively cleaner sound of the albums that precede Manticore, coupled with the more accessible tone and lack of any real atmosphere homogenised their sound and rendered them competent, but hardly as trailblazing as they once were. Manticore doubles down on the cheese, but invokes the fantastical, folkloric leanings of their earlier albums in an attempt to converge the two aspects. The result is twofold: The release is genuinely good fun, loaded with breakneck riffing and cataclysmic passages that stir the blood like only Cradle can. Secondly, the freeform concept allows it a greater scope; it feels more epic, more theatrical, more operatic in a genuine, if slightly pantomime way. They embrace the novel nature of their music by expanding upon their gothic groundwork, and although the release feels markedly less oppressive than their earliest full-lengths, it occupies a comfortable middle-ground between their two eras whilst capitalising on the aspects that work and affording the experience more dynamism. The use of an orchestral component feels nuanced and well-implemented, accentuating and adding depth to the present musicality without lapsing into pretence. Dani Filth's slightly modified and admittedly less-impactful vocal style here makes use of his trademark shrieks and echoing lows to great effect, but unfortunately they do ring slightly hollower than usual due to a mix of technique and production choices. Nonetheless, they still transmit the unmistakeable sense of Cradle's halloween brand of evil.
Riffs abound on Manticore, and for the most part they are hard-hitting and well-written. 'For Your Vulgar Delectation' and 'Nightmares of an Ether Drinker''s hurricane pace have echoes of thrash metal interwoven with a grand classical influence, and are a lively and frenzied affairs. Single release 'Frost On Her Pillow' utilises a pleasantly widdly main melodic throughline enshrouded with a cavernous central hook, and has an excellent mid-point bridge that uses the SFX of a women screaming to shunt the subdued music back into the main body of the track. It encapsulates pure CoF energy in a gloriously offhand way, and feels like a knowing wink-and-a-nod to those familiar with their brand of gothic eroticism and schoolboy edginess. 'Illicitus' and 'Pallid Reflection' capture a Cradle of Filth more familiar to longtime listeners; targeted metal chaos, with Manticore's own sense of seductive grandeur undercutting the experience like a sharpened razor. It's also heartening to see Dani experimenting with other vocal approaches on the record, with 'The Abhorrent' featuring a moderately cleaner technique that affords texture and additional atmosphere in a startlingly intuitive way. It doesn't become a motif on the record as such, but in the moments that it is utilised it works startlingly well contextually. 'Death, The Great Adventure''s morbid core preoccupation is facilitated by its alternately mournful and grandiose composition, the latter emphasised by a haunting female vocal keeping pace alongside the riffs. The classical refrain in the latter half of the track is also a nuanced choice, accompanied only by Marthus' excellent percussion lending a modern edge to the proceedings. It's unapologetically shameless in its flagrant pretentiousness, but when the quality of the music is as highly polished as this, such a sense of novel silliness can be readily forgiven.
CoF's first album as a three-piece, The Manticore And Other Horrors exhibits more dimensionality to its sound than many albums from the band's 2000s releases. It wallows in its playfulness, capitalising on its fairy-tale-by-way-of-campfire-horror aesthetic in admittedly silly yet smartly implemented ways, retaining the signature fiery energy but dispensing with the superfluous fluff that padded out their recent full-lengths. It feels refined, astringent like absinthe on a cleansed palette, but with a crystal clear vision lending clarity to the muddled and blinkered corner the band had painted themselves into beforehand. The horror leanings feel less outrageous and the edge has been sanded down to a blunt pumice, yet the expressionistic extravaganza of Cradle at their most flamboyant remains untouched. Moreover, this likeability is buoyed by the lack of expectation; there is a committed sense of idealism behind the project in the same way that The Principle of Evil Made Flesh tested the waters 18 years prior. It takes what the band are aware works, and develops that groundwork to tease out a more defined musical direction. This evolution is clearly not fully realized at this point, but the gestating sense of direction pervading the release along with the newfound inspiration and re-invigoration pulsing throughout points to exponentially greater tidings manifesting in the future. It feels like a proud flag in the ground for the band's renewed energy, and a resolute middle finger to their many detractors.
