Extreme metal veterans Cradle Of Filth return with their new album ‘Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness Of Decay’ which comes out on September 22nd, the gothic follow up to their epic 2015 album “Hammer Of The Witches” which saw the twin guitar fury return in only the way the UK heavy hitters do. We speak to the always friendly and articulate Dani Filth about the new album, the inspirations for the songs and the upcoming world tour.
Andrew: I’ve been spinning the new album and I think it’s another winner, congratulations on the new stuff!
Dani: Brilliant, thank you!
Andrew: The last album “Hammer Of The Witches” was a fantastic album, I loved it. But this time around, what has changed? What were some of the things you wanted to do differently this time around?
Dani: We wanted to write new songs [laughs]
Andrew: [laughs] Obviously yeah!
Dani: It always helps when people say what’s different about this album, so it does have different songs on it! But there’s a few things that are different about this album that we put into the mix fairly often, firstly that would be the fact that there were no intro, outro or middle section orchestral pieces and these were more incorporated into the bulk of the songs. The songs are longer as in the traditional Cradle Of Filth style. There’s some acoustic work in there that we hadn’t done before, there’s more guitar solos that are not just for the sake of it but are really well thought out guitar solos which is something that’s kind of new that’s been brought to the table in Cradle Of Filth. We incoporated a choir on the record but it’s not a massive choir, it’s more a ghostly choir with emphasis on lead soprano so it’s very eerie sounding which fits very well with the concept of the record. We’ve written possibly one of the heaviest songs which we’ve ever written which is “Death And The Maiden” which is very different in the fact that it’s very slow and meandering and very epic and builds up to a big climax and a very different way for us to end the main bulk of the album because normally we end on a very fast song. Although it does get faster and faster in places but it’s an enormously heavy song. We brought back a figure from our past to sing on one of our tracks which is Liv Kristine, formerly of Leaves Eyes and Theater Of Tregedy and who sang on the track “Nymphetamine (Fix)”, she sings on the track “Vengeful Spirit”. She plays a very different character in the song, she plays a woman who is betrayed and commits suicide but returns to pergatory as this vengeful spirit who torments the person who has wronged her in her life which is essentially me. So she’s a protagonist and I’m the victim in the song which we sort of feature as a cruel duet and it’s a very different song to “Nymphetamine (Fix)” as people will be expecting that, it’s kind of thrashy but she brings a heir of beauty and the beast to the proceedings in that track.
We’ve also undertaken a cover version which appears on the special edition – I’m hinting and pushing people towards the special edition because it’s ace. When we wrote the album we weren’t writing it with a special edition in mind, we’re just writing an album and we follow the premise that we love all our children equally, so it’s very difficult to divide and push songs towards beyond the boundary into a special edition because we want people to hear all of them so I recommend that version. But yeah a cover of Annihilator’s “Alison Hell”, kind of been wanting to record that for ages and it felt right now because it’s quite a complex song. It all fits right in to the theme of the record and it sounds like it belongs on the record and also bumped into it’s author which is Jeff Waters several times over the last couple of years, in fact I bumped into him 3 weeks ago at Bloodstock.
Andrew: What did he think?
Dani: He loves the song, he thinks it’s the best. He actually put a quote on our website from him saying it’s the best cover that’s ever been done of an Annihilator song. We tried to play it as close as to the original, normally we really bastardize songs, really Cradilize them but normally they’re songs that aren’t traditionally metal so we turn them into Cradle Of Filth tracks or metal songs anyyay. But with this one, apart from a smattering of keys and a slight in the drums speed up 4 bars in the end, the rest is as close as to the original as possible and we really wanted to do that. Make it our own but make it as close to the original as possible because it’s a great song anyway.
Andrew: Yeah and I’m a huge fan of Annihilator and Jeff Waters himself but why that particular song? Was there a specific reason why you wanted to cover that song?
Dani: Well it’s all of our favorite song of Annihilator. We were going to do “Crystal Ann” at the beginning but we thought we were just dragging it out too much, might as well do “Crystal Ann” and then “Welcome To Death” so we could just keep going! But it’s just a personal favorite and I think it has a really eerie atmosphere which I think fits the band perfectly and like I said, we’ve been wanting to do it since “Cruelty And The Beast” where we had been talking about covering it.
Andrew: Now you mentioned earlier about the album having some thrashy moments but I feel there’s also together with that Victorian gothic horror that you’re kind of going for, that it sort of has a darker tone to the album compared to maybe “Hammer Of The Witches”.
Dani: Yeah I think so. I think it has some big, dizzying moments of gothic melodrama, big drop downs and I think adds quite a lot to that, whether they are singing latin or my lyrics or having the lead soprano do some eerie parts that sway the music. I think lyrically and musically it is darker, it’s also a more involved record. I think “The Seductiveness of Decay” title track is pretty…and I’m not exaggerating here, but I think it has 10 billion riffs in it!
Andrew: [laughs] I was going to say that’s my favorite song on the album, it has so many twists and turns that’s it’s almost progressive in a way.
Dani: Yeah and people have said there’s a lot of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal on them and what they mean by that is it’s got a lot of twin guitar work which it has and also people have said it’s quite proggy but proggy in a black metal/thrash metal kind of way. Torturous twists and turns, very melodic, lots of weird, off the wall ideas. It’s a brutal album as well but every song is different from one another. It wasn’t hard to pick a single because we had to find it was the right length and sort of characterise the album but it’s hard when somebody says, ‘What defines a record, pick a track’, and we go, ‘Well we can’t really’. Because each song is something unto itself so there’s no one definitive song that would encapsulate the feel of the record’.
Andrew: It’s also a great title for the record and I’m not even going to pretend to know how to pronounce it properly!
Dani: It’s easy, it’s just Crypt-toriana so it’s an amalgam of the word ‘crypt’ and ‘victoriana’. So it implies the Victorians fascination with macabre and death and the supernatural.
Andrew: Was there anything in particular that inspired you to write about that particular theme?
Dani: We went to Brno in the Czech Republic as kind of…well not a team building excercise as such but it was, but to collate all the ideas that people had been working on in their own galaxies and we came away from that writing session or that collating session with pretty much 80 percent of the album in place. Obviously then it went through several metamorphosis and mutations, even in the studio. But when I came away from that session I had the music in front of me and I was able to go on a feeling of what the album was about and ironically before that I had been reading a huge amount of Victorian gothic horror and ghost stories, collective mainly by the likes of Ian Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Blackwood etc and it just seemed to fit perfectly with that. I know a lot about the Victorian age so I know about the infatuation with spiritualism and all the attraction with freak shows and asylums and the list is endless really. London was like an acropolis at one point and I just found it fascinating so I thought it would work very well as an overarching theme, it’s a loose theme but it’s not a concept record, but it’s conceptual.
Andrew: Yeah I know what you mean, there’s an underlying theme there but it’s not a concept record so to speak. But that’s always been pretty prevalent in all your albums anyway, you always have some kind of storyline or idea that’s thematically running through the album.
Dani: We’ve done 4 conceptual records where chronologically it’s a story and I think because of that, I’ve personally backed myself into a corner whereby everybody thinks automatically that everything we do is conceptual. I mean yeah it’s conceptual as conceptual can be for this record, the artwork and the video and everything else further enforces that but it’s not chronological, it’s not a story from A to Z. Everything revolves around the Victorian theme whether it’s based on Victorian gothic horror, it’s written on Victorian gothic horror or the story or lyrics are based on the Victorian era. Like Satellites orbiting this plain, overarching umbrella.
Andrew: I would imagine these songs will play out pretty well live, what have you got for tour plans and is Australia going to be on the radar this time around?
Dani: Absolutely! We are under new management, our previous manager who we had for 20 years, retired and obviously our new manager wanted to reboot the band and a great idea for a world tour which will be our most in-depth touring that we’ve done for absolutely yonks. We go to Loud Park in Japan and then we undertake 11 dates in Ireland and the UK and we then have a short break but the main bulk of the world tour starts in January and continues right through to mid-May with one week off. With Australia I can’t tell you the exact dates as our manager is a stickler for synergy so he’ll want to co-ordinate that with the record company outset everywhere but I can tell you it’s going to be in May.
Andrew: Looking forward to it! I guess it’s been 3 or 4 years since you were down here last.
Dani: 4 years yeah, it was 2013.
Andrew: It will be good to have you back again, do you remember much from that tour at all?
Dani: What, are you implying I was drunk all the way through it? [laughs]
Andrew: [laughs] Well sometimes shows and tours become a bit of a blur after a while I guess.
Dani: It was a great tour, very well received by the fans. I particularly remember having a day off in Brisbane and going to a Kangaroo sanctuary, it was just really good fun and had a good meal out. Oh no we had 2 days off in Brisbane actually which was amazing, we went to go see The Bronx play and I had never been a fan of The Bronx. In fact I thought they were a glam band and I went to see them and I was like, ‘Wow this was brilliant’. We just had a great time, it’s always a great time. I always feel a little light headed because of the lack of sleep and the flying and everything but love the weather, love the atmosphere of the place and we’re just sorry that we haven’t gone over again in the meantime. But we’re really looking forward to coming back in May and it will be hot I would imagine in May won’t it?
Andrew: Yeah it will be the tail end of summer although summer never really ends here until winter starts. We only have 2 seasons, winter and summer pretty much!
Dani: Summer ends when winter starts and we don’t have winter! [laughs]
Andrew: Exactly! Well congratulations on the new album, it’s good stuff again and I think you got another winner on your hands and we are looking forward to seeing you in Australia next year hopefully! Thanks again for your time, really appreciate it.
Dani: Brilliant!
Keep up to date on Cradle Of Filth including tour dates and more at the Official Cradle Of Filth Facebook page
Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness Of Decay is out September 22nd 2017
cradleoffilth.com
