Crippled Black Phoenix-A Love Of Shared Disasters-CD-FLAC-2007-THEVOiD

Crippled Black Phoenix -A Love Of Shared Disasters
Artist : Crippled Black Phoenix

Album : A Love Of Shared Disasters

Label : Invada
Genre : Rock Source : CDDA

Encoder : FLAC 1.2.1 Bitrate : 807kbps

Playtime : 76:58 Size : 438.15 MB
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
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

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