After their stellar A Love of Shared Disasters release on Invada, my interest in Crippled Black Phoenix‘s 200 Tons of Bad Luck was immediate. It may be a collection of tracks culled from the double-disc offering, The Resurrectionists/Night Raider, but as a single-disc album, it works completely, from the breathtaking opener “Burnt Reynolds,” down through the rest of the psychedelic darkened folk or whatever the hell you want to call it. I’ve returned to it more than I even thought I would, and considering I was still digging into the last one when I bought this, that’s saying something.

I never reviewed it, which is kind of a bummer, because it would have been fun to go through track by track and talk about the wide swath of musical ground covered in these 12 tracks, but for the purposes of this year-end list, I’ll just say that Crippled Black Phoenix are one of few bands out there who can execute a heaviness in their songs without actually being heavy. Despite having something like 47 members in the band at any given time, the sound still evokes a crushing, desolate feel that’s more prevalent in “Crossing the Bar” and “Whissendine” than in any number of death metal albums I heard this year.

The only bummer about 200 Tons of Bad Luck (aside from the music itself, which is kind of depressing, but in a good way) is there’s so much more material on The Resurrectionists/Night Raider I haven’t heard yet. The Invada UK store has it for £16, which I’m pretty sure works out to $180, so I’ll have to start saving my pennies. In the meantime, there’s plenty of dreary minimalism here to accompany me through the bleak winter months ahead.

Tags: Crippled Black Phoenix, Top 10 of 2009

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.