Album Review: Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder by Cradle of Filth

After playing a pivotal role in popularizing extreme metal in the late-1990s by ingeniously co-opting the aesthetics of goth metal and Norwegian black metal and transforming it into something completely different and over the top, Cradle of Filth has struggled with inconsistency ever since their 1996 breakthrough Dusk…and Her Embrace. It’s not as if the English band has been resting on its laurels; anything but, in fact, as they’ve been churning out a heavily hyped new album every two years like clockwork, but for all the overblown arrangements and extravagant conceptual ideas by diminutive frontman/impresario/corpsepainted carnival barker Dani Filth, being prolific seems to have come at the expense of putting out a quality product. While Cradle of Filth continues to be as popular as ever, their studio output has been decidedly up and down, especially in recent years, 2003’s symphonic opus Damnation and a Day ambitious but horribly, horribly bloated, 2004’s Nymphetamine a welcome return to form, and 2006’s follow-up Thornography subsequently taking another step back.

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