Review
On their thirteenth album Sceaduhelm, British dark-rock collective Crippled Black Phoenix trade their typically massive historical narratives for a bleak, inward-looking study of burnout and exhaustion. Much of this psychological shift is mirrored in the songwriting, which ditches explosive payoffs for "slow builds and manufactured tension" that focus intensely on restraint. Across the record's 66-minute runtime, the band's three vocalists—Belinda Kordic, Ryan Patterson, and Justin Storms—collaboratively construct a world where, as Sun-13 notes, "there's an acceptance that we've hit rock bottom".
Musically, this produces a deeply melancholic mixture of post-rock, doom, and gothic rock, marked by skeletal piano melodies and stark acoustic strums. The tracks often strip away their heavy instrumentation to "drag out a stirring feeling of unease and anticipation", using eerie synthesizers and spoken-word voiceovers to punctuate the quiet. As The Progressive Subway describes it, "If CBP's prior releases were the spectacle, Sceaduhelm is what remains once the spectacle has faded", resulting in a cohesive work of slow-burning beauty.
