Cronos – Dancing In The Fire
Cronos – Dancing In The Fire
Dissonance / Cherry Red
Release Date: 13/06/26
Review by Jon Deaux
6/10
Cronos released a solo album in 1990. Not because Venom was about to conquer the world, but because – and this is an accurate assessment – they had imploded, like all bands do sooner or later, especially when you spend the better part of the 1980s pretending to be demonic but in reality, living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Beautifully, the timing was all wrong. When MC Hammer was bigger than God and Nelson (AKA The Timotei Twins) was considered a threat to humanity, Cronos strolled innocently into the apocalypse with thirteen tracks of Thrash Metal and whatever other genres wish to mesh, ranging from an homage to his own demonic past and folly, or an act of career suicide. Welcome to “Dancing In The Fire”.
Naturally, let’s make it very clear that this album was not the one fans were expecting. Black metal, the genre of music that Venom unknowingly pioneered by simply being louder than the neighbors, had given birth to actual Norwegian teenagers who took the whole Satan thing seriously, to the point where they began burning down churches. And yet, what do we get from Cronos himself, an album where the whole “Satan” act falls by the wayside in favor of professionalism? It’s like watching your uncle attempt to get a mortgage because, suddenly, he’s decided to clean up his act. You can feel his attempt at a comeback, as awkward as it is like trying to dance after a hip replacement.
Venom’s early trilogy – ‘Welcome To Hell’, ‘Black Metal’, ‘At War With Satan’ – was a success because it was gloriously bad. It sounded like it was recorded in a shipping container on a thunderstorm night. But the thing about ‘Calm Before the Storm’, released in 1987, was that even the most dedicated of Venom fans were thinking to themselves, “You know what? Maybe, just maybe, a certain level of competence wouldn’t go amiss?” The man who essentially started Black Metal by virtue of being incompetent has since sounded competent with Cronos. ‘Dancing In The Fire’ is Thrash Metal that’s been to therapy. It’s like listening to someone who used to smash down doors asking if he can use a hammer.
Take ‘Fantasia’ as an example. It kicks off with some chugging guitars that have all the intent of a band hitting the market with a vengeance. Problem is, the whole affair has a sheen to it. Not bad, per se – more like finding out that Cronos hasn’t spent his time conjuring demons from the underworld with spells from the Necronomicon, per se, more that he’s spent his time studying the intricacies of a contract. There are ‘Terrorise’ and the self-titled track that have the Thrash riffs the style demands. Trouble is, it sounds like the first time the band has bothered to tune their instruments since listening to Venom.
Jim Clare and Mike Hickey (the two guitar players who could have spent their time bettering their craft instead of living the dream) manage to play their parts competently enough to make one wonder what could have been if Venom ever considered such a thing as tuning their guitars, or maybe actually thrashing together long enough to write one decent song. The production is the cleanest Cronos has overseen in any record to date. Which, given his pedigree of chaotic sonic abattoirs, is akin to arguing that a kebab van is clean compared to an abattoir floor. It’s progress. Not necessarily good progress. But progress.
Of course, the problem with this is, as I say, the ordinariness it reveals. Venom were never anything other than a glorious shambles, and the joy was you never knew whether the stuff was any good, just how crap it sounded. Well, removing both the offensiveness and silly production here, what you have is a bunch of quite good songs. Speedball is exactly as it should be: totally unoriginal, just riffing for the sake of it. ‘I’ll Be Back’ has a riff that sounds so generic, you would swear it was used by half a dozen other bands from the same era. And ‘Vampyr’, yes, with a y, is, it pains me to say it, the template for Cradle of Filth doing everything better with the addition of corsets and actually enunciating the vocals.
And then, of course, there’s ‘Old Enough to Bleed’, a title that’s just as dated as Jimmy Savile’s knighthood. The problem with the edginess of the Metal scene is that what’s intended to be unapologetically countercultural now looks like your evidence from the witness stand. The tune itself is unremarkable, run-of-the-mill Thrash Metal by the numbers, but the title? File that up at the same desk with all the Manowar album artwork and Vince Neil’s parenting tips column. You listen to this now and think what exactly Cronos thought he was sticking it to. The hegemony of good taste? Mission accomplished, mate.
‘Painkiller’, not to be confused with that Judas Priest album, is a plodding, thoroughly unremarkable track. ‘Bobbytrap’, a name that sounds like it was chosen by a resident alien learning their first language, is a lost opportunity. ‘Hell to the Unknown’ makes you think that, for a start, the song’s title is more interesting than the song itself. When you get to ‘My Girl’, you just know that Cronos is having a laugh. It’s filler. Thirteen tracks was one too many in 1990; it’s still one too many now.
Then there’s “Chinese Whispers,” which continues the esteemed tradition of title tracks named after games that most people played on the playground because they wanted to sound edgy. Speaking of which, this doesn’t sound very edgy at all. It sounds like just another band trying to get signed to Combat Records during the brief window of time the label thought the whole “grunge” thing might be a flash in the pan.
The real weirdness of this release is the Venom cover of ‘At War With Satan’… It’s like a sad realization that maybe the old stuff was better after all. The original was a sprawling mess of ambition gone wrong, where the album collapsed under its own weight. This one is more polished, better played, but somehow less effective still. It’s like trying to describe a joke to somebody – you know what’s happening, but it isn’t very funny.
But what makes it all so interesting is that ‘Dancing In The Fire’ was eradicated so completely from the face of the earth that the re-issue feels like some kind of archaeological dig. Neat Records, home to all the Newcastle acts who’ve ever choked on their own pretensions, had already lost all remaining credibility by 1990. Venom’s breakup had been the nail in the coffin for them, but releasing Cronos’ album was like opening a VHS store in 2024—possible, but unnecessary?
Lars Ulrich might’ve credited Venom with inventing everything short of the wheel, but Cronos’s solo effort landed with the cultural impact of a cough in a library. The thrash kids had moved on to Sepultura and Obituary. The Black Metal kids dismissed Cronos the moment he stopped drawing pentagrams on everything. And Metal fans? Well, they didn’t know who Cronos was, and frankly, they still didn’t care.
Cronos’ involvement with Dave Grohl’s Probot side project in 2004 was more a wistful nod to the passing of the years since ‘Dancing In the Fire’ by way of acknowledging the cultural importance of the Venom years. It was nice for the guy to get a shout-out from Grohl, but come on, Cronos’ solo career was the afterthought, the footnote, the epilogue.
What’s the point here? ‘Dancing In The Fire’ isn’t a bad album, it’s just not an album anybody needed. The dude who helped birth Black Metal by way of sheer ineptitude and brilliance managed an alright album when he tried. And in doing so, he managed to inadvertently reinforce the notion that he perhaps shouldn’t have bothered. The problem was, by 1990, nobody was really listening. The Thrash movement was dying off, and Grunge was about to arrive. Metal was quickly falling into obscurity unless you came from money and a dope habit. They would reappear as Venom, and while it’s hard to not get the sense that perhaps they were better off as a mess than what this was.
If you’re a completist for Venom, well, sure, you probably own this one already. If you’re not, then don’t bother. Listen to Black Metal and think of good times when Cronos couldn’t play the bass properly — and this is the result of him learning how to play the damn thing, and learn he did… and well.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Fantasia
02. Terrorise
03. Dancing In the Fire
04. Speedball
05. I’ll Be Back
06. Vampyr
07. Old Enough to Bleed
08. Painkiller
09. Bobbytrap
10. Hell to the Unknown
11. My Girl
12. Chinese Whispers
13. At War With Satan
LINKS:
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