There is a particular kind of band that never quite gets praise in the moment. Crippled Black Pheonix have spent over two decades making that incredible music you hear somewhere, make a mental note to check out later, and then forget about until the next time you hear it. Founded in 2004 by Justin Greaves, the collective has released twelve studio albums that move freely between post-rock, dark rock, gothic atmosphere and folk, always resisting the kind of easy categorisation that might have made them an easier sell. Sceaduhelm, their thirteenth album, arrives at a moment when the culture at large seems to have aligned with the gloomy sensibility CBP have inhabited for years. What now passes for zeitgeist has long been their second nature.
Sceaduhelm takes its name from the old English for “shadow helmet”, a term suggesting a masking of whatever lies beneath the surface. As ever, Greaves writes the music, but the lyrics and vocal lines are allocated to whichever voice best suits the moment. This decision gives the album one of its defining strengths: the triangulated vocal presence of Belinda Kordic, Ryan Patterson, and Justin Storms, whose performances each inhabit a distinct psychological space. The effect can be disorienting at first, as Sceaduhelm keeps shifting its emotional balance in ways that hold you suspended in its unease.
After the instrumental ‘One Man Wall of Death’, ‘Ravenettes’ opens with a one-two-three-four count that lands almost punk before the song finds its insistent groove and settles into something anthemic, with Kordic’s vocal precision giving the track clarity and drive. From the outset, Sceaduhelm appears concerned with shifting internal states rather than building momentum. The record builds inward, each song becoming a self-contained world, a statement in its own right and not a part of a sequence as such. This sense of volatility deepens as the album progresses. On ‘Things Start Falling Apart’, Justin Storms pulls things toward a quieter, more suspended register, with a post-rock backbone and structure that doesn’t resolve into release. Then, Ryan Patterson introduces a different kind of weight on ‘No Epitaph/The Precipice’. His gravelled delivery traces a rough contour, almost Nick Cave-like in gravity, before the arrangement subtly mutates and mellotron starts flickering beneath the surface, the song slipping into more progressive terrain. It is here that the album’s intended architecture becomes more obvious. “One step away from the void”, Patterson sings, and the song folds into the next, ’The Void’. The segue is clean and it borders on self-conscious, tipping perhaps into a kind of half-ironic fatalism: the record stares into the abyss and points out that it’s doing so, turning the gesture faintly meta.
‘Dropout’, with its synth-led detachment, exposes yet another record facet. Its textures are reframed through something colder, closer in spirit to The Knife, yet bound to the same emotional environs. And when Vampire Grave starts, it feels like an earned pressure release. Part Monster Magnet swagger, part Type O Negative gloom, it carries hooks and an intensity that reframes the tension that’s been building all along.
Sceaduhelm is not a perfect listen from start to finish, and it doesn’t seem to want to be. Its strength lies in the fact that neither of these songs depends on the other to hold. There is real cohesion here, but also a subtle resistance to the idea of the album as a unified whole, something that never quite resolves. For a band that has built a career on the long and patient form, this friction feels significant, less of a flaw and more of an open question. Intentional or not, it lingers.