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Midian is the fourth full-length album by Cradle of Filth, released on Hallowe'en 2000. At the time it was considered their most commercial and accessible album to date. It is a concept album inspired by Clive Barker's novel Cabal and his subsequent film version Nightbreed, and Doug Bradley - who had a small role in the film but is better known as Pinhead from Barker's Hellraiser and its sequels - provides narration on some tracks. While keyboards remain prominent, Midian is more guitar-oriented than its predecessors. The cover art was created by JK Potter. In the Bible, the Midianites are an Arab tribe descended from Abraham, and Midian itself is where Moses spent his forty-year exile from Egypt. Today, the former territory of Midian is found through small portions of western Saudi Arabia, southern Jordan, southern Israel and the Sinai. The people of Midian are also mentioned extensively in the Quran, where the name appears in Arabic as Madyan. The song "Cthulhu Dawn" invokes the character from horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Many other heavy metal bands - including Metallica, Morbid Angel, and Bal-Sagoth - have namechecked Cthulhu. "Her Ghost in the Fog" spawned both a video directed by Alex Chandon (which received heavy rotation on MTV2 and other rock channels), and a sequel in Nymphetamines "Swansong for a Raven".
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