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Review: Cradle of Filth/Alcest, Motion
The UK’s most notorious, tabloid- and godbotherer-baiting extreme/black metal act (yep, those legendary Jesus Is a Cunt T-shirts are still on sale at the merch stand) return from a gruelling European tour to play Bristol for the first time in seven years, drawing every goth in town and a huge contingent of metalheads. This pre-Halloween show was originally billed to take place in the Marble Factory, where the Filthies played last time, but has been upgraded to the main room at Motion to accommodate the heaving throng. Clearly, absence makes the dark heart fester. There’s even one of those fashionable ‘trigger warnings’ that are so popular among tremulous young people. Notices around the venue warn that the show will include a loud bang, but this “is part of the performance and there is nothing to worry about”.
Two French support acts have somehow managed to find their way into Brexit Britain too. Naraka are a modern metal band from Paris and Marseilles who incorporate elements of black and death metal into their sound. They benefit from an excellent drummer, while their vocalist has clearly studied Phil Anselmo’s every stage move carefully.
is needed now More than ever
You’ve got to hand it to softly-spoken, super-polite Neige and Winterhalter for taking the building blocks of shoegaze and black metal and creating something novel and distinctive with Alcest. Watching them completely win over someone else’s audience with the grandeur of their chiming guitars and choral vocals is always a joy, though it’s clear that a sizeable proportion of this audience are already converts.
Given a generous hour-long slot, they deliver a career-spanning set that delves all the way back to 2010’s Écailles de Lune but is dominated by their most recent and accomplished album, Spiritual Instinct, including the stand-out Sapphire, which is a magnificent refinement of the approach they’ve been developing for the last 15 years or so.
Autre Temps from Les Voyages de l’Âme remains the perfect gateway for the uninitiated, while the lovely, hypnotic Oiseaux de proie is the only song from Kodama to keep its place in the set.
It surely can’t be long until Alcest are headlining larger venues, when they’ll hopefully have sufficient budget to create a proper stage show rather than the usual backlit hair-flailing.
Cradle of Filth certainly know how to put on a show, with an elaborately dressed stage and plenty of pyro and confetti bombs. Incredibly, Dani Filth has been performing his infernal shriek at the front of an ever-changing band for more than 30 years now. Of the newest recruits, latest keyboard lady and vocalist Zoe Marie Federoff is most impressive, especially in that beauty and the (great) beast duet with Dani during Nymphetamine (Fix).
The painted Suffolk screecher, meanwhile, just can’t stop moving for the full 90 minute set, filling idle moments with shadow-boxing and bouncing up and down like a fun-sized prize-fighter who’s decorated his jacket with sawn-off garden railings, which threatens to knock over his ornate microphone stand at any moment.
During I Am the Thorn, Dani produces what looks like a shotgun but turns out to be a confetti gun that he discharges with a deafening crack. That must be the bang we were warned about. OK, so it’s not exactly Rammstein, but it’s an effective moment.
Crawling King Chaos from amusingly named recent album Existence is Futile is offered as a commentary on our times and they eventually conclude with the impressive Us, Dark, Invincible from the same album, which seems to mark a conscious move into more disciplined symphonic metal territory. Fortunately, the current CoF line-up seem more than equal to the challenge.
An extended encore includes grandiose newie Necromantic Fantasies and a rare audience participation moment during Gilded Cunt. “Come on, you only have to sing one word,” chides Dani. “Even the fucking Germans did it.” It’s back to Midian for the last song, the evergreen Her Ghost in the Fog, accompanied by even more pyro and confetti, which does the trick and proves to be quite the treat.
All pix by Mike Evans
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: October 2022
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