The Principle of Evil Made Flesh
| The Principle of Evil Made Flesh | ||||
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Cover design by Nigel Wingrove
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| Studio album by Cradle of Filth | ||||
| Released | 1 February 1994 | |||
| Recorded | Academy Music Studio, Dewsbury, England, September-November 1993 | |||
| Genre | Extreme metal | |||
| Length | 52:34 | |||
| Label | Cacophonous | |||
| Producer | Robert "Mags" Magoolagan | |||
| Cradle of Filth chronology | ||||
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| AllMusic |   |
The Principle of Evil Made Flesh is the debut studio album by English extreme metal band Cradle of Filth. It was released on 1 February 1994 through Cacophonous Records, following three demos released between 1991 and 1993. The album's sound is significantly more raw than on subsequent releases, and frontman Dani Filth's vocals differ from his later style and technique. The album is a then-unusual hybrid of gothic metal and black metal. This would be the only album featuring guitarist Paul Ryan and keyboardist Benjamin Ryan; guitarist Paul Allender also left the band at this point, but returned five years later for Midian.
Some of the tracks from this album were later re-recorded for V Empire (1996), Bitter Suites to Succubi (2001) and Midnight in the Labyrinth (2012).
In the book The Gospel of Filth, Gavin Baddeley describes the album and its place within (or alongside) the contemporary black metal scene:
Principle did share several characteristics with the Scandinavian black metal emerging at the time, above and beyond the kindred fascination with all things dark and devilish. Cradle's debut is their rawest recording, chiming with the crude underproduction now demanded by black metal purists (though how much of that rawness was due to inexperience and budgetary limitations is another matter). It's still the only Cradle of Filth recording accepted as "true" black metal by many in the murkier corners of the underground... [but] there were as many things separating Cradle of Filth from the emerging black metal pack as they had in common. Just as important to Cradle's developing identity as the metal bands they grew up with in the 1980s and their contemporaries in the '90s was the dark verse and literature of the 1880s and '90s, produced by the artistic deviants of the day, known as the Decadents... Under the icy influence of the Norwegians, black metal had become a nihilistic, savage world of darkness and suffering, with little space for sensuality... Cradle pioneered a slick gothic image, emphasising the seductive aspects of the dark side...
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Wikipedia