Cradle Of Filth - The Manticore And Other Horrors Album Lyrics

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The Unveiling Of O

[Instrumental]

 

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The Abhorrent

I sing desolation
On the breath of centuries
Bringing annihilation
Slaughter courses through my enemies

I was not always so cold
Once upon a crime in times of favour
I had lived a God amongst the bold
Like a true poetic saviour

But my people were dissolved
By the flames of righteous strangers
My name blackened ten thousandfold
Death grew to know me...

As the abhorrent

Stricken from the light
As dividing curses poured
I was hiding in the thickening mire
Biding for my war

I'm climbing up the years to get you
From a dark abyssic scheme
Lovecraftian, part-Martian
To the beast I used to be

My laureates of gold are sold
Horns spear the reddened sea
And by my transformed hand
Be sure
The Heavens hear your final pleas

Tonight this world is burning
To a fulsome serenade
Arch nemesis, I'm the genesis
Of a raging plague about to break

Blue eyes rolled headlong to black
When the darkness drew me to her caresses

I was not always so cold
Once upon a crime in times of old

I had lived a God amongst the folds
Of creeping epic failure

But my people were dissolved
By the flames of righteous strangers
My name blackened and deeds annulled
They grew to know me...

As the abhorrent

I'm a cemetery and a garden
Ripe with near-putrefied life
A phallus beginning to harden
On the philosophy of a prurient knife

I hear the dead begin to cry,
"Hostis Humanis Generis."
My favorite leaden lullaby

On sacred eves I've asked for sacrifice
Mere moments of atonement
For your despise
A stern believer
That the great deceiver
Is your precious God
Whose preachers saw me demonised

Now, the sun it sets
On your nascent best of days

Time to rise
Gorgon, Calibos and Cain
Titans unrepentant
Lord Lucifer insane

"If I am the Devil
I shall honour my spiteful name."

Tonight this world is burning
To a fulsome serenade
Arch nemesis, the rest of this
Destructive wickedness is on its way

I'm climbing up the years to get you
From a dark abyssic scheme
Lovecraftian, part-Martian
To the beast I used to be

My laureates of gold are sold
Horns spear the reddened sea
And by my transformed hand
Be sure the heavens hear your final screams

 

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For Your Vulgar Delectation

Welcome with a stench of misadventure
Libertine and sibling things a grim
Slither forth through the gateway's hissing denture

The moon, one up on the chateau battlements
Gilds this torchlit drive to Shangri-la
This solstice calls like the piper to rodentia
Come join this hive of masqueraders

This eve is pure and pagan
Its teeth are in the past
Dark royalties of ancient caste
Feast in splendour

For your vulgar delectation

Decreed
That hunger shall be sated by the dawn

In marble ballrooms of delight
The erotic and the wicked dance alike
Virgin cunts aquiver at this foreplay for the spiteful

The cellars smelt abrim
With cracked wine and racked women
Are spiced for even Marquis appetites
Screams an aphrodisiac
For the blackest ever nightfall

Lords, heed the call

Vast boudoirs here
Are mastered by the minatory
Walls plastered with the base relief
Of baser glories

Ma Cherie Debauchery
Deflower of my life untie their bonds
And push these fantasies
To ever greater stories

For your vulgar delectation

Inhibit nothing, run free
Loose sore cauteries before me
Ripped, prolific scars
Are titbits on which to feed

The heathen hour strikes
Wrong the rites, beasts ravage for your soul
As lovely entrapment snaps her fingers
Hell comes crawling

This eve is pure and pagan
Its teeth are in the past
Let the cream of sinners learn at last

For your vulgar delectation

Decreed
That hunger shall be sated by the dawn

Dawn... burning, aghast

With the judgment that we spend upon the evil
We feed eternal hungriness
Exceeding vile deeds that were freed in this cathedral

For your vulgar delectation

Decreed
That horrors shall be waited on the ones
Who crave sin's innovations

 

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Illicitus

Forlornucopia, the wealth of misery
And favoured haunts of sorrow hold no lure
Deep swathes of gloom
That once cocooned me in dark livery
Now clothe me in suits ill-borrowed from the pure

Alas it's true
The beast you knew
Found breath anew
In the taut heartstrings of love's assassin

She was a huntress
And an alabaster bride
A Venus not averse to taking sides

And in all my centuries
Bar Carmilla in cerise
Never had I fallen save for foolish pride

As we walked, our affrighted lanterns
Fed the lengthy shadows with their tallow lullabies
The fragrant night air chilled by sighted phantoms
Clouds drew cobweb threads across a sallow moonrise

Illicitus

So capricious

Superstitious to the point of philistine
The glue of secrecy grew paper thin
Her beauty so delicious
In the realm of the divine
The cross about her throat gave up to sin

In expectation
Her lips to find
The crates were blazing in my stone cold cellars

That traitor love
Once its spell ran headlong through my veins
Now I felt it surge again
Like an urge for murder
...Her kiss
The paradigm of bliss
Hot whispers on the wind
In swan-like curves I graced salvation

Amidst both worlds I promised her
Eternity would be beautiful

Yet on the cusp
I still not truly dared

Her eyes plied hard a burning will
Beseeching on her knees
Like Salome unfulfilled

I hung between two thieves
Guilt and spilt desire
Until that flame became a fire
All consuming

With strength renewed
I turned again
Death all lit up by my perfect victim

And she grew
The scourge of men
They hissed her name in perverted dictum

Now we walk, our cavorting auras
Feed the lengthy shadows with their sullen lullabies
The fragrant night air filled with haunting chorus
Clouds draw cobweb threads across a bloodied moonrise

Illicitus

Illicit
Us

 

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Manticore

Write a story. Any story.
But let it have dragons...

O Gods of war
In the jungle corridor
I feel your haughty presence feasting the Manticore

She stalks the shadows, burning
The smoke is thick and reaks of blood
Her hunger an eternal yearning

Tantric, necromantic, a wank fantasy of faith
She religiously feeds
A feverous all man-eater
In the trees I see her eyes like slithering she of snakes
Monstrous this chimera
In her beautiful anger

Screaming from the pulpit
Damnation's oratory
She is the whispering poisoned dart
And the breath of Armageddon all around
The embodiment of evil in a body full of raptures
Anthropophagous

Manticora

Press the silent violin of frisson over horror
In my forced hand
Sphinx will sing her song and coloured in lullabies
Death endorsed invades our lands

Gigantic, pyromantic
A beast of naked flame
Panting blackened masses from her opulent Godhead
Ill-barbed are those tongues spread wings eclipse her frame
And in her deep crevasses Kundalini vents unfed

In darkness
Her fastness threshed with fleshing teeth
She comes to masticate you whole

She is the bane of mothers
Grand leveller of Maa Kali's Mardi Gras
What man would damn the world to summon her?

Be still
Pray silence lest she stoops to conquer

The perverse acid queen
Ten thousand pillars in her heart
Uphold a cracked palace of frozen killers
And the mirror in her soul
Polished black for scrying nightmares
Bubbles with a lust
That yearns to burn again

Razor backed, she attacks
Empire's battle cat
A creature of the white devil's rule
Mythical and mystical
Provinces will recall the swarm of refugees from her pall

Mimicking victims
With a voice of the choicest deadpanned in pain
Awful claws hold rapport with the skins of mankind

She is the whispering poisoned dart
And the breath of Armageddon all around
The embodiment of evil in a valley full of raptors

A lick of fire on her lips as silent as a will o wisp
She comes amongst you all, tigressive
Blazing in her pride hellraising horrors from the dark-side...

Manticore

 

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Frost On Her Pillow

Facedown I sprawl in the forest's cathedral
Where she lies in thrall
To a slippery coffin

I first saw her grin in this graven lair
My heart starting to canter
Snow white skin and raven hair
Lips full red as a blood decanter

But hatred hunted there
In tyranny's mirror
Magickal rites
Turned with jealousy
On a young reflection

Back then spring's breeze sweetened the night
Now the evenings are longing
Shadows delight
And frost on her pillow
Glitters by the moonlight

Months saw me lost to her elegant, decadent ways
This past midnight cinderella
With a smile like the winter sun
On a misty day
And star-grazing eyes raising cappellas

But poison stunted there
Seven trees weaving
Arbour on nights
Spent in ecstasy
'Neath their woodland awning

She fell foul to witchcraft's designs
A weeping willow

Wicked willed to sleep
There's frost on her pillow
At the cost of mourning

Now the lands fall grey, devils revel and obey
A cruel beauty drifted from a dark novella
The queen of hearts tarred
By the cards she's swift to play
In turrets over all where angels smell her ways

Our fairytale is over
My love lies dead
The kingdom writhes in a bed of dementia
Misadventure strides instead

A sore, wilde picture like Dorian Gray
Pressed against the glass in pain
One final graven kiss to say,
"My love I will avenge."
Those fleeting hours flowers bloomed
Beneath the tree-entangled moon
Why did you have to leave so soon
My illuminary friend?

But hatred hunted there
In tyranny's mirror
Justified spite
Turned armageddon
On a stunned reflection

Back then Hell's freeze strangled the night
Summer is coming
New flames ignite
And frost on her pillow
Is lost to morning light

 

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Huge Onyx Wings Behind Despair

Bloated with disease
A psychophantic grease that clings
Like a shroud thrown over me
A coat of golden fleas
And by their gleam
The shadows grow to be

This soul is sick
This soul is sick with wicked exploration
My vulgar habits stitched the rabbit hole
A welcome mat for infestation

Fettered from the get go

Listen to them laugh
For the roads to glory goad you
Thistles on the path
Always cast by the ones who know you
From the dark

We are less than worms and vermin

Black clouds low and roll
Shipwrecked in my psyche
By siren fantasies
Serpents
Curl about my goals
Hissing through the mirror
As they slither over me
Now...

I pray you see the light
Before huge onyx wings behind despair arise
They splay night skies with desolation

And the Devil never lets go

Fate caught me
In flagrante delicto
Shame taught me
Hells self-obsessive fresco
Ruled by horrors

Grue, no butterfly become
Cocooned in utter guilt
The gutters silt has overrun
My rue transcendence
Sheol builds Golem
And this offence to nature
Is hunting independence

The more I wallow in grief
The more fatalist I fall
To this engorging beast
The greatest traitor of them all

Bloated with disease
A psychophantic grease that clings
Like a shroud thrown over me
A coat of golden fleas
And by their gleam
The shadows grow to be

This soul is sick
This soul is sick with wicked exploration
My vulgar habits stitched the rabbit hole
A welcome mat for infestation

Listen to me now
For the road to glory goads you
Thistles on the path
Always cast by the ones who know you
From within the mirror

 

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Pallid Reflection

Here forms a knotted sorrow
The vivid grasp of fading faces
Storm clouds plot to follow...

I wander despondent, a curse on the grave
Her hair in my locket, a lock of nightshade
And there in my pocket, I nurse the charade
Her ring is awaiting her back
I watch her from shadows, pariah by day
I sleep in dark belfries and cellars away
From the ungiving living, their neurotic plague
Has turned her, as I to the black

"Faster beats the drum of dark arcanum"

Marie
I turned a deaf ear to heaven
When the evil eye accompanied me

You'll see
I am no further needed in the mirror
By my pallid reflection

I thrust so perversely, the worst is this crave
For sweet scarlet blood from a harlot parade
Of dutiful victims I beautifully take
With delicious malicious intent
A gift from a goddess who toyed with her game
The price of my night's infidelity paid
At the altar of her never faltering blade
Of infernal nocturnal descent

"Faster beats the heart of dark arcanum"

So I walk the moonlit quarters
Like a driven beast of prey
A catalyst for madness, slaughter
Given the leash to play

I'm detritus to my chosen
A ghost for all her days
Thus is Cocytus frozen
From those loved and left betrayed

Dream-dappled streams of sunshine
Dread fogs shall dissipate
As red skies descend on graveyard floors
Where the dead exhilarate

"My heart is gone
Taken by a nightmare bourgeois creature
Now you belong
To your sick womenagerie..."

N, n, no, no
I'm not the reason for this bleeding
N, n, no, no
My past is fast leaving me
Aghast in purgatory

"Faster beats the drum of dark arcanum"

Marie
I turned a deaf ear to heaven
When the evil eye accompanied me

You'll see
I am no longer greeted in the mirror
By my pallid reflection

So I stalk the moonlit quarters
Like a driven beast of prey
A catalyst for madness, slaughter
Given the season

I taste the true nature
Of this secret caste
This devil undone
Soars free at last...

 

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Siding With The Titans

Where nature's russet beauty grew the roses of Utopia
The stench of vented corpses floats abroad
These killing fields will yield to new horizons so Cyclopean
With the advent of our resurrected Lords

Siding with the Titans

Cast into the ancient dark of Tartarus
Below the underworld
These ancient bastards bore their agonies
Or, locked in slumbrous nightmares
Twixt the spheres or 'neath the seas
The slept until the righting of the cosmos set them free

They slept until the blighting of the night sky
Let them loose on you and me

Welcome this return
Titanomachian and Vatican-hearsed
The mass enslavement of a passive Universe
In nary a day the earth was burning

Leviathans and Krakens
Colossal horrors rising forth
From oceans spewing Tsunamis
Like heralds of malevolence
Dispensing holocaust

The grandiose ballet
Of death and ravaged flesh
The span of Mankind shut down
In one massive shattered fucking breath

A slice of moon thrust a fatal glow
On their cold relentless freedom
From core to crust and conquered pole to pole
Reconfiguring for a fecund second Eden

I had glimpsed this Hell before
This twisted fungoid Boschian garden of insanity
An infested Nevermore
Rife with delights to annihilate humanity

Gods fell upon us insects with world-devouring maws

When nature's empty bounty died,
I dreamt this tragic sight
We precognitioners just tuned the signal to you all
Amplified, the vision fried, pulsing magnetic stars were right
Vast gates drew open
What slathered forth began the fall

Siding with the Titans

Our last mistakes to which awake
Past masters, mad and cruel
Shalt witness the explicitness of their rule
But I shall be rewarded
And take my place amidst the black
For what else is there left to do save usher these monsters back?

I welcome this return

I welcome this return
Mountains of perversion, Elder versions and worse
The mass enslavement of a passive Universe
In nary a day temples were turning

On judgment day
I'm siding with the Titans...

 

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Succumb To This

Succumb to this slicker genesis
The serpentine wish of a decadent stranger
This fixed insistence
From a twisted out-of-mind

Succumb to this

He is scum to his kind
Slumming with the cast
Of his vast Imaginarium
Darkness come refined

Succumb to this wicked nemesis
The paralysis of hissing imminent danger
His kiss persistent, lips whisper his design

Numb with bliss, licked of menaces
This Philistine itch caught pissing in the manger
Is never distant from unresistant sides

Succumb to this

He will promise the earth
Laughing with the grasp
Of all past denominations
A master of rebirth

"Flee demon flee
I cast thee out with the power invested
Please leave me be
My heart is a biblical wreck"

Cease and just see
I rule this wide-eyed world unmolested
Increasing fantasies
With a wave of my hand
And high tides of turning freed

From the dizzying breeze of Quarantania

Beauty swoons in caresses of nature
Pleasures of the rooted flesh await her
The taste of heaven for endeavouring Man
To a greater measure of temptation's folly

Lo! The splendour of the throne
The feasting spread of best harvests
Picked clean off the bone
The shining kingdoms
Blent against red sunset skies
And everywhere the scent of better wonders
Set desires to fiery rise

"Tonight
All the stars burning bright are but a canopy for me
A Cinderella story, stellar jealousies are rife
For my Prince holds a divine right
Enlightened with the glorious"

Blind faith falls for the First Seduction
Induction into halls of shame

With classic joys and fresh allures
Life leads fantastic overtures
"Indulge, only the coy abjure"
This orgiastic ride

Sigh!
His smile's just a laceration
With a fascination for the massing dark side

And he means war...

Succumb to this wicked nemesis
The paralysis of hissing imminent danger
His kiss persistent, lips whisper his design

Numb with bliss, licked of menaces
This Philistine itch caught pissing in the manger
Is never distant from his soul-corrupted prize

He will show miracles
Building on the fast
Iconoclastic innovations
Growing empirical

Succumb to this

 

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Nightmares Of An Ether Drinker


Bursting with madness the moon shall derange
The ether caresses my veins
Cursing the feverous reign
I taste the change

Lips curl, my grip starts to harden
Maelstorms are loosing in the garden

Angels will whisper bane
Hidden meanings in the teaching of pain
time warps with their kiss bestowed again

Go go go tidal vertigo
Back is an arrogant front
Truth is a lie, suicidal eyes
Plummet From the summit of this pissed up...

Nightmare

Hellucinations, bare mountain night
Walpurgis is thirsting for souls
My coven is stolen
For blood still muds the knolls

Visions soar phantasmagorical
Collidescopic, whetting the oracle

Fast awake to make this dreamland obey
Forsaking others for the chasing prey
I take another draught, fates spirit me away

Go go go wicked vertigo
Intoxication is a fur
Worn about stitched arctic shoulders
It sets this melancholy beast to purr

Lost in bliss, the mooring slips

Hyde is high and mighty
In veneration of his role

Dreams amass
Nightmares are rising
Unsympathising
Dreams a massace

I have left bereft the flesh
Sanctuary for the grail of woe

Now suddenly I see
Like innocent breath through a perfumed harem
A gash of lightning tearing ashen skies
Betray the scene
A deathless army, the greatest ever been
Lurks frighteningly silent
Hanging on the fatal call for carnage

Come the awful sundering
The devilment is thundering

fellow travellers tread careful
Hell awaits diethyl dreams
These lush pretence dimensions wean

Come the awful sundering
The devilment is thundering

Seeking ways back to our world
Eldritch curators scheme
Horrord rush upon us as we flee

I plunge on a comet, vomit the sea
Lunge upright to flames advancing on me
Dancing like mardi gras dark company

Dreams amass
Nightmares are rising
Unsympathising
Dreams a massace

I am riding high tonight
In celebration of my role

Dreams amass
Nightmares are rising
Unsympathising
Dreams a massace

I will leave relieved my flesh
Sanctuary for the grail of woe

 

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Death, The Great Adventure

[Deluxe Digipak Edition Bonus Track]

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being
[--Carl Jung]

Sometimes red curtains fall
Before the act has headed for the wings
As on that night disaster crawled out from the stalls...

Suddenly the dark, the thickest Stygian dark
Pressing on all sides with vertigo
Running from the quickest in the sickest abyss
My spirit’s lifted by an angel of woe

A dredged up dreadful past
Drags discordant thoughts my way
Unforgiven and driven to despair
I sense the mordant wraith Azazel
Standing there

Now the vision simmers
I spy a distant gleam
Racing ever closer
Through this persistent dream

And by its welcome glimmer
Writhing into sight
The brutish groping nightmares
That hide beside the light

Then a roar
And a voice like a pride of lions
Thunders from the maw
In a blackened mass
The creatures flee
Screaming bloody murder as
A shining gateway opens for me

Death, the great adventure

At the peril of my soul
I welcome death, the great avenger

Spared this awful realm
Where those who stalk the living haunt the murk
Untethered pleasures keep them tied to flawed
Human

I'm floating upwards still, to where the tunnel mouth reveals
Two manticores that ward an ebon door
I must lean resolve as the luminance dissolves
And I am thrust headlong into the venomous jaws
I am in darkness again
But here accursedness is vastly deeper

Unforgiven and given to torment
I am nothing
Grotesque, grotesque, bereft of judgement

This abyss, a void
Where stripped of all but self
One must wish to be destroyed

To pass on somewhere else

Beyond this pit of wicked shouts
Of madness and fallacies
Aeons I failed to rail my doubts
Before fear left love saving me

Then a roar
And a voice like a clash of titans
Thunders from the maw
In a seething mass
The horrors flee
Screaming bloody murder as
A shrouded sky opens immensely

Listen!
What Eden shall arise
Abundant from the cliffs that stunt hell’s
Redundant cries?

A view of breathtaking beauty
Unveils, as the sun dispenses perversities

Death, death, the great adventure

For the glory of my soul
I welcome death, the great avenger

The damaged man revives
With dawning truth, this morning suits
The world I left abruptly
In exaltation, I find myself alive
Near—death to steer a long life led corruptly

The sweet silver chord that keeps me moored
I know that heaven sent her

From the cold to hold her face again
I rose from death, the great adventure

 

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Sinfonia

[Instrumental]