Crippled Black Phoenix / The Croft, Bristol
Mercenary outsiders bring myth and ritual to Bristol.
Words Ash Dosanjh
When Crippled Black Phoenix’s ambitious debut LP, A Love of Shared Disasters hit the shelves in spring, the supergroup of mercenary outsiders, or so they described themselves, promised to create “regal songs about love, loss, tragedies and redemption”. And that’s exactly what they did.
Comprised of Electric Wizard’s Justin Greaves, Mogwai’s Dominic Aitchison, Gonga’s Joe Volk, Charlotte Nichols and Pantheist’s Andy Semmens and Kostas Panagiotou, to name but some of their ever-morphing cartel, they have amassed a collection of antiquated songs of such depth and warmth it would be cruel to dismiss them as self-deprecating, even if they do attain that morbid quality of despair, nostalgia and woe.
Tonight at The Croft, a venue that has long been credited with nurturing the more curious talent Bristol has to offer, eight of Crippled Black Phoenix vie for stage space. All dressed in Victoriana-meets-Wild-West garb, they relay their blend of prog rock and folky melancholia with a certain twist.
If one thing’s different between their record and standing before them now, it’s their sheer volume, which, to this day, has left a ringing in my ears; a worrying but pleasant reminder of their intensity and ardour.
But that’s not to say the brutalness that Greaves and Volk are able to thrash out on their guitars on tracks like ‘Goodnight Europe’ and ‘Sharks and Storms’ drown out Nichols’s delicate finger dancing on the neck of her cello, or the aural mardyness of barefooted stand-in bassist Charlie Romijn. Even Volk’s command of croaking vocals, which displays a vulnerability and braveness so lacking in music today, can’t be nulled.
