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Cradle Of FilthNymphetamine Roadrunner/UMG Cradle Of Filth's sixth album will probably do more to damage the schlock-horror act's already tenuous links to the extreme metal scene than all their previous releases combined. Sure, 'Nymphetamine' is aggressive - probably the most straightforwardly so in a long while - while Dani Filth's infernal shrieks and the horror-movie keyboards are still ever-present. But musically, the band now probably have more in common with their Roadrunner labelmates than with the black metal scene their new record company continues to associate them with. For the most part, the tracks on this album (especially the first 'single' Gilded C---) sound more like a Dani Filth-fronted Chimaira than anything indebted to a genuine extreme metal lineage. But the problem with 'Nymphetamine' is not that Cradle have 'sold out' by turning metalcore (after all, they've been accused of 'selling out' for most of their career) it's that by incorporating such a strong metalcore feel within an otherwise extreme metal project, they attempt to straddle a divide that can't be bridged so unproblematically. Not quite ready to completely embrace the trendiness of metalcore, yet equally unwilling to fully explore the more symphonic and/or musically extreme impulses also inherent in their songwriting, Cradle Of Filth ultimately end up doing nothing: 'Nymphetamine' is not extreme metal, nor metalcore, nor even a successful hybrid of the two. In cobbling together the direct aggression of metalcore with the expansive grandeur of their earlier works, the result is something of a Reader's Digest version of classic COF: songwriting that was once lavishly detailed in the 'Dusk And Her Embrace' and 'Cruelty And The Beast' days is here rendered in condensed, truncated form. By stripping the music to its basics, Cradle have given it more crunch, but at the expense of sophistication and complexity. It's particularly apparent in the fleeting moments where 'Nymphetamine' breaks out of the metalcore mode. Tracks like Nemesis employ galloping, power metal-tinged leads which briefly gesture at the kind of grandness that was once ther stock-in-trade. But it is two tracks at the end of the album that most illuminate the shortcomings of the remaining 12. Swansong For A Raven and Mother Of Abominations are closest to the Cradle of Filth of old. These songs work because they take their time to develop; through an interplay of tempo changes and mood shifts, COF are able to build tension and interest into these songs that is seriously lacking in their more dynamically challenged counterparts. The metalcore influences ultimately drain the remaining tracks of the texture that was once so central to the band's songcraft, leaving them hollow, repetitive and plodding. Unfortunately, in embracing directness and simplicity, 'Nymphetamine' becomes emptied of style and substance.  |
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