4) “Behind The Jagged Mountains”
[youtube]https://youtu.be/4rkvn5ADyKk[/youtube]
While 2010’s Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa featured an enthralling concept arc involving cult worship of Lilith, the band yielded enough material during the writing process to include an entire second disc of songs that didn’t fit in with the primary disc’s story. “Behind The Jagged Mountains” is another of Filth’s odes to HP Lovecraft, specifically At The Mountains of Madness. The lyrical content alone is worth a listen, but the music’s just as enticing. Like the rest of Darkly, it bears the same excellent balance of orchestral and extreme metal instrumentation, but its less-layered progressions create a catchiness some of the album’s denser tracks ended up lacking.
5) “Balsamic and Anathema”
[youtube]https://youtu.be/MxU8KCg1EZA[/youtube]
The band’s Gilles de Rais-themed Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder was a welcome return to form after the lackluster experimentation that plagued Thornography and, to a lesser extent, Nymphetamine. The special edition of the album featured an extra song, “Balsamic and Anathema,” that actually fits with the album’s concept, but which was left off the original sequence due to the time constraints of the CD format. This song fucking shreds, and it’s got more bite and breadth than Godspeed‘s weaker inclusions like “The Death of Love” or “Ten Leagues Beneath Contempt.” And added narration from former Hellraiser actor Doug Bradley is never a bad thing.
6) “The Snake-Eyed and Venomous”
[youtube]https://youtu.be/d46DUbCWBOc[/youtube]
I’ve already shit-talked Thornography in this entry, but there’s no Cradle of Filth release that’s totally without value. The album not only experimented musically, but with format, as well; Roadrunner re-released it with some DVD and digital-only content in the Harder, Darker, Faster version. One of the songs that was left off the original release, “The Snake-Eyed and The Venomous,” featured some of this session’s more memorable and intense songwriting, and it felt more akin to some of the lesser tracks from Nymphetamine or Damnation and A Day than its Thornography comrades. The band definitely used this period to play with the idea of including serious, sing-song hooks in their compositions, and while there were serious misses here, “The Snake-Eyed and Venomous” managed to deliver a hit.
