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Crippled Black Phoenix -A Love Of Shared Disasters
Artist : Crippled Black Phoenix
Album : A Love Of Shared Disasters
Label : Invada
Year : 2007
Genre : Rock Source : CDDA
Encoder : FLAC 1.2.1 Bitrate : 807kbps
Playtime : 76:58 Size : 438.15 MB
Tracks:
01 The Lament Of The Nithered Mercenary 02:37
02 Really Howd It Get This Way 04:49
03 The Whistler 09:45
04 Suppose I Told The Truth 05:04
05 When Youre Gone 05:36
06 Long Cold Summer 10:35
07 Goodnight Europe 06:09
08 You Take The Devil Out Of Me 04:24
09 The Northern Cobbler 07:33
10 My Enemies I Fear Not But Protect Me From My 06:35
Friends
11 Im Almost Home 05:32
12 Sharks And Storms Blizzard Of Horned Cats 08:19
Notes:
In "Ramadan", the 50th issue of his Sandman comic book
series, Neil Gaiman took some liberties with the myth
of the phoenix. In cultural variants, the phoenix rises
from its own ashes or inters them in an egg of myrrh.
But when Gaiman's phoenix dies, it lays two eggs, "one
black, one white: From the white egg hatches the
Phoenix-bird itself, when its time is come, but what
hatches from the black egg no one knows."
Now we know: It's a supergroup of sorts, one that leans
heavily on the "doom" of its roots while forgoing the
"metal." Performing material written by Electric Wizard
drummer Justin Greaves, with Mogwai bassist Dominic
Aitchison helping to set the tone, Crippled Black
Phoenix has also drawn members of Pantheist, Gonga, and
Seattle's 3-D House of Beef under its sooty wing. In
Western thought, every concept creates its opposite,
and if the phoenix embodies redemption and
resurrection, Gaiman's black egg embodies downfall and
annihilation. Crippled Black Phoenix's debut album (the
first in a planned trilogy) follows suit with a
collection of apocalyptic hymns.
There are flashes of salvation: "The Northern Cobbler"
sets a Tennyson ballad, spoken in its original
Lincolnshire dialect, against a languid, optimistic
post-rock crescendo. The poem finds an alcoholic
cobbler hitting rock bottom, then kicking the bottle
and regaining his societal standing. But moments of
uplift like this are few and far between, and the bulk
of the album is taken up by a lugubrious plod. "The
Northern Cobbler" also summarizes the ways in which the
album doesn't satisfy-- it's an interesting idea that
doesn't amount to much musically (the words are all but
impossible to discern unless you read along with the
original text, although there's some pleasure in the
rhythm and texture of the brogue itself), and it's one
of many impediments to the album's flow.
A Love of Shared Disasters is so eclectic that its
parts don't cohere into a harmonious sum. There is a
dominant mood of macabre gloom, familiar from slow-core
depressives like Black Heart Procession, with an
instrumental palette heavy on singing saw, vintage
harmonium, accordion, strings, woodwinds, and other
agents of creaky melancholia. The album is at its best
when it plays into it. On opening track "The Lament of
the Nithered Mercenary", a field of static and a baggy
wheeze surround a monastic throat song by Andy Semmens,
a droning basso who imbues dirges like this one and "My
Enemies I Fear Not, but Protect Me from My Friends"
with unique gravitas. "The Whistler" weaves a harmonic
braid around an eerie minor-key theme. "Long Cold
Summer", with its elongated, ramshackle progression,
sounds like a goth Dirty Three.
But these superior moments have a tepid overall impact,
largely because their cumulative force is blunted by
the frequent insertion of songs that neither make sense
in context nor impress on their own. Far too many
tracks find Gonga's Joe Volk helming anonymous rock-
structured songs that sound like a cross between-- I
kid you not-- Calla and the Goo-Goo Dolls, derailing
the ponderous momentum of the instrumental or Semmens-
sung tracks every time. On "Really, How Did it Get This
Way?", "Suppose I Told the Truth", and many others,
Volk's generically gritty howl and amorphous acoustic
guitar structures render the album's extraterrestrial
atmosphere mundane. A supergroup needs to integrate its
concerns to stick together, and it sounds like that
didn't happen here. A Love of Shared Disasters wants to
be two focused albums, a solid Semmens-fronted one and
a mediocre Volk-fronted one. It's hard not to feel as
if this phoenix crippled itself by shoving them
together in one bloated package.