Review: Cradle of Filth, Marble Factory

Think of Australian metal and the bands that spring to mind are those in the Rose Tattoo/AC/DC mould like Airbourne – purveyors of heads-down, no-nonsense hard rock who hone their craft while dodging flying missiles hurled by crowds of Mick Taylors in outback Wolf Creek bars. Lately, however, extreme metal seems to have slithered Down Under and is being re-exported in our direction. The bizarre Portal played on this very stage during Temples, and now the much more impressive Ne Obliviscaris open for Cradle of Filth at an absurdly early hour. This Melbourne mob describe their music as ‘progressive extreme melodic metal (with violin)’ and claim influences ranging from black metal to jazz and flamenco. By rights, it ought to be a terrible mess, but their epic songs hang together well, rather like a proggier Eluveitie without the folk element. We shan’t forget them in a hurry, will we Latin fans?

The challenge faced by Suffolk’s infernal Cradle of Filth has always been that their music struggles to live up to that carefully cultivated image, from those enjoyably rude T-shirts to the imaginatively art directed photo shoots and everyone’s favourite quotable fun-sized Satanist Dani Filth’s effervescent personality. (He recently marvelled that CoF continue to arouse the ire of god-botherers in such backward nations as, erm, New Zealand, causing “issues of real importance [to be] overshadowed by the cheeky slandering of a mythical deity”.) Alas, tonight’s show has been downgraded from Motion, which means the band have to cram onto the Marble Factory’s smaller stage. But – hey! – here’s Dani coming on to Heaven Torn Asunder sporting spiky red and black leathers and a rather fetching pair of horns. These prosthetic protuberances clearly ain’t going to last for long, and he ditches them for the second song. That’s about it for lavish showmanship in the Filthies’ scaled-down show: no crawling gargoyles or saucy, semi-clad maidens wielding angle grinders this time.

That leaves the music, which is of typically variable quality. Dani’s shriek still sounds uncannily like Ned Flanders’ scream of joy on finding purple drapes in the Simpsons episode Realty Bites (YouTube it) and the band are at their best with their more grandiose, symphonic material rather than the bog-standard black metal. Songs like Right Wing of the Garden Triptych and encores Nymphetamine Fix and Her Ghost in the Fog give recently recruited keyboard player and vocalist Lindsay Schoolcraft a chance to shine. Dani really ought to bring her forward instead of tucking her away at the back of the stage and do more of those ‘beauty and the beast’ duets that work so well. Still, there’s no denying the crowd-pleasing nature of the set as the satisfied hordes shuffle back towards Temple Meads in their sweat-drenched Jesus is a Cunt T-shirts.