Day 17 - "The Smoke of Her Burning" by Cradle of Filth (2003)

 

As we’ve already seen when we dived into the world of Christian metal, a genre which is interested in images of the grotesque, destruction and the darker elements of humanity finds a lot to love in the apocalypse. Whereas Christian bands spent their time trying to explicate the complexities of Revelation for their audiences, those within the more (relatively speaking) mainstream metal world were also using their music to examine some of the ambiguities of apocalyptic thought.

It would have been quite easy to have simply posted up 24 metal songs on this blog, such is the depth of the genre’s interest in the end of the world (i.e.Slayer’s “Soundtrack to the Apocalypse” box set).  Metallica’s 1983 “Four Horsemen”, for example, imagined their audience having a choice between either joining the avenging horsemen or facing destruction themselves:

The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On the leather steeds they ride
They have come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the four Horsemen ride
or choose your fate and die.

A recurrent theme in metal is the use of biblical motifs to criticise the scriptural text itself.  This can be at the more commercial end of the genre (see Marilyn Manson’s “Antichrist Superstar”) or at its harder edge. Cradle of Filth, formed in the pit of iniquity known as Sussex in 1991, are noted for their “extreme” rock music, on stage theatrics and anti-religious sentiment (most infamously, a t-shirt of a nun in a compromising position). Despite the sometimes over-the-top nature of their work, however, their lyrics are often be thoughtful and well realised. Their 2003 album “Damnation and a Day”, for example, featured a Miltonic trek from “Genesis to Nemesis” which included today’s track, an exploration of the fall of Babylon explored in Revelation 18.

One of the potentially disturbing features of the Book of Revelation has always been the violence with which God’s judgements are poured out on the earth. For example, the idea that blood will flow for 1,600 stadia up to the height of the bridles of horses, or that an angel will bid the “birds of the air” to feast on the “flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small” are both profoundly disturbing. Here, the band use the ambiguities of this violence to call out an apocalyptic mentality as “genocide”. Written from Satan’s perspective (see Milton) the song imagines the final battle as a kind of Manichean dual between equally matched forces of good and evil. The irony is that Satan’s response to God’s violence is to engage in destruction himself (So before the sword side with me in slaughter). In the song, the “smoke of her burning” therefore refers not to Babylon burning for her sins as in Revelation 18, but instead to the holy city of Jerusalem. But regardless of the final outcome, there is no hope in this apocalypse – only terrible, vindictive destruction upon both sides.

The Smoke of Her Burning (Filth, Allender, Powell, Pybus, Erlandsson, 2003) 

Earth and sea cower from my screams
As I climb into the skies.
Atop sins towered Heaven-high for me
From whence I see no reason why
I should not smite with vengeance
And hurl thieves down from paradise.
For as storms before were as nothing more than a breeze next to this night.

I am Methuselah of the tribulation.
The Moonchild come to harm.
A riot of stars shaken from their stations.

The choking smoke of Jerusalem burning. Six vices become wrath.

And though half-blind with ravening
Like Phineus now I see the end declared from the beginning.
Love won through my defeat.

But now I fear I will never peer on Her radiance again.

I shall glimpse instead the slurried red of faces

Pressed to bloodstained panes.

Betrayed and played by God

Who alone but He scapegraced and goated me?
Now I wish to piss on His parade.

Angels, clawed with burnished wings still loyal, kiss the seal.
Bent on knees and harrowing promise overkill.

Know that you shall die like whores
And the cries of your writhings shall rise
To please their Lord...
So before the sword side with me in slaughter.

I am Methuselah of the Tribulation.
The Moonchild come to harm.
The spoken horns of desolation.

Drink the pouring of my fury.
Those darkened waters spur the brink of war as my judge and jury and rapist executioner.
Our time is short, the horsemen ride.
A foul-breathed chora howls, besides
Damnation and a day has passed
this divine right to genocide.

Weld the gates to heaven shut.
The abyss leers in hissing ruts.
Unhilt the black grimoirie of death,
inscribe all names that God has left

I lived the dream of Nymph and Men,
but now the nightmares come again.

Now the nightmares come again...

We come again...to kill...you all. 

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar 

Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Smoke-Of-Her-Burning/dp/B001GTMZIE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355735609&sr=8-2