SPINEFARM
Vampires never get old, and Creeper know it. The cryptdwellers’ third album was a charismatic, be-fanged gothpunk rock opera high on blood and its own vaulting ambition. Running counter to modern metal’s prevailing wear-yourtrauma-on-your-sleeve trend, Sanguivore was defiantly dramatic, swooningly romantic, frequently over-the-top and full of the kind of old-school, air-punching tunes that most other bands who aren’t called Ghost have apparently forgotten how to write.
The headline news was that this tale of undead beloveds Spook and Mercy channelled the genius of the late Jim Steinman, the visionary behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell and aman who was to restraint what cows are to Olympic high jumping. Death-or-glory nine-minute opener Further Than Forever and showstopping piano ballad closer More Than Death lived up to that billing –epic tunes that didn’t so much lean into the ridiculous as embrace it and wrestle it naked on the floor. There were other reference points, too, such as The Sisters Of Mercy (Black Heaven), Danzig (Lovers Led Astray), The Damned (Chapel Gates) and even Billy Idol (dancefloor banger Cry To Heaven), not to mention classic 80s and 90s fang-flicks Near Dark, Fright Night and Interview With The Vampire. So far, so eldritch.
Yet Sanguivore was more than just a copy-and-paste homage to an era that none of the members of Creeper, or most of their audience, are old enough to have seen. Frontman and blood-drinker-in-chief Will Gould –aka William Von Ghould to give him his full nom de vampire –and his bandmates had taken the anything-goes spirit of their illustrious forebears as much as their sound and turned it into something fresh and new. This was no dumbly reflexive attempt to ape the past. Every skyscraping chorus, every throbbing, black-hearted bassline, every dramatic vocal that sounded suspiciously like it was being sung through fanged incisors was perfectly considered and even more perfectly executed.