Cradle of Filth - Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder Roadrunner Records Released 10/20/08 Tracklisting- 1 - In Granduer and Frankincense Devilment Stirs 2 - Shat out of Hell 3 - The Death of Love 4 - The 13th Ceasar 5 - Tiffauges 6 - Tragic Kingdom 7 - Sweetest Maleficia 8 - Honey and Sulphur 9 - Midnight Shadows Crawl to Darken Counsel with Life 10 - Darkness Incarnate 11 - Ten Leagues Beneath Contempt 12 - Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder 13 - Corpseflower The one Sentence Review: This kind of makes me wish the band was still annoying.

Ok, Cradle of Filth. Before listening to 'GodSpeed on the Devil's Thunder', I had actually dug out 'Midian' and 'Dusk and Her Embace' from an old CD book, cleaned them off and gave them a few listens. It's rhetorical for me to say that there is no such things as a 'perfect' album, or that every release has it's strong points and weak points. When I listened to 'Midian' and 'Dusk and Her Embrace', the major drawback has always, always been the vocals, not so much music, or the lyrics for that matter, but the vocals. On 'Midian', portions of songs such as 'Lord Abortion' or 'Her Ghost in the Fog' just contain the passages where Dani Filth unleashes this puberty glorifying bat-screech of a scream and I would wince and turn it down. With 'Dusk and Her Embrace', I felt like I was listening to some sort of Anne Rice audio tape, like I should be a fat chick hanging out in my bedroom with some candles lit and a $14.99 stainless steel pentagram around my neck. The counterbalance of all this would usually be the riffs, the symphonics, the atmosphere, there was at least something that served as the opposing force against those awful vocals.

Now, 'Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder' is going to kind of make you wish that the band either disappeared or would have never changed the formula. Granted, the vocals have always been terrible, but the music was the savior in those cases. On 'Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder', there is no counterbalance, actually, there isn't a whole lot of anything going on here, even for Cradle of Filth's standards.

The albums entire concept rests on Gilles De Rais. In short, French nobel fights alongside of Joan of Arc, inherits a fortune, and decides that his time is better spent committing sodomy on children and young adults and engaging in hobbies such as hanging his victims up with a hook (through the neck), raping them, taking them off of the hook and comforting them before either killing them or repeating the act. Essentially, for the most part, this has little to do with anything besides lyrics and spoken word intros. I've listened to concept albums before. The key word is 'listened'. You can, to some viable degree, hear the concept playing out in front of you from start to finish. The concept hear is in the lyrics, and not the music. This is, after all, a drained and fractioned version of the same music we've been hearing since 'Dusk and Her Embrace', just not nearly as bombastic or engaging.

Which leads me to my next statement. The music, across the board, is pretty stripped down. The vocals are atypical with any Cradle of Filth release, but there are no 'attention through ruptured eardrum' vocals here, they're pretty bland, even for Dani Filth. The music is equally unengaging, the riffs are of the paint by number nature, and the drums follow suit. The major theatrical/symphonic element is all but a shade of what it normally held in this band's musical formula. There are portions of the songs where you'll have the keyboards, and a choir in the background, but it's momentary, and in the case of this album, with it's flaccid musical showings, could have used a few more kicks like this to keep it awake. I feel bad even saying that I miss the ridiculous overkill symphonics and the cheese bombing of the old releases.

Eight of the thirteen tracks start off with some form of spoken word. Keep in mind what I said about the band's execution of the concept on this album, and have some type of grip on when I say that this is time-consuming fodder. This is no different then meeting somebody for the first time, and having them shake your hand eight times the first hour they meet you. It's sense of having to be polite and having to extend your hand over and over again when the voice in your head keeps saying "what an asshole".

The music itself has some moments where it's audio bliss, where the engine has every square inch of it trucking fullspeed into the colon of Hell and into the guts of madness. The first proper track, 'Shat Out of Hell', has a nice break with some meaty guitars and big accents from the choir. 'Honey and Sulfur' opens up in a huge way, with a triplet littered riff accented with bursts from the kick drums and the big contrast offered from the choir, again. 'The 13th Caesar' has a moderately engaging chorus to save it from the blackhole of filler. If the majority of the record sounded like the aforementioned, you'd be reading a completely different review right now.

Outside of the torrential music that certain portions of these songs unload, there is little to nothing at all that remotely stands out. Even the album cover looks redundant. Give me an old copy of Photoshop and a picture of any mid-20's mall cruising moppet, and I'll duplicate the cover. I'm not in the business of telling people what you should and should not listen to, if you're a Cradle of Filth fan, you're probably going to ignore me and just buy this anyway. I am in the business of telling people that there is better stuff to listen to, better new releases, better old releases. Better albums that have more substance, more intensity and more engagement, things to return to and things to anticipate both in their respective works and works to come. 'Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder' has mere moments of enjoyment floating aimlessly in a sea of second-rate background noise. They have released better music in their time, and they are more then capable of releasing better music in the future. I used to hate this band for their older sound, but I kind of feel even worse about them now that they are basically a single-digit fraction of a double-digit whole.

Final Score: 5.5/10
Written by Baazgor for Metaltome.com, January 2009

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