Crippled Black Phoenix – New Dark Age

Pink Floyd Influenced Post Rock

New Dark Age is the 9th studio album by Crippled Black Phoenix, a project fronted by Justin Greaves, former drummer of Electric Wizard, which also features members from a diverse collection of bands, including Iron Monkey, Gonga, Hearts of Black Science, and, perhaps most importantly to their style, Mogwai, whose influence shows heavily in the long, drawn out song forms that the group typically employs. They have self-described their music with the term “endtime ballads,” which describes both the evolution of their genre-blended style, their dark lyrical subject matter and the compositional structure of the music.

On this album, which features one six-minute song as the opener and three more that range from 15-20 minutes in length, their style puts the rock in post rock, employing long compositions with long arcs and slow builds, but with a huge amount of classic rock influence in the riffs and vocal lines. The opening song, “Spider Island,” feels the most satisfying; it is the most concise, and its intro, a sample followed by a synth glissando underneath which the whole band comes in, provides a lot of punch and does a good job of drawing the listener into the album. Unfortunately this does not carry on into the rest of the tracks. It loses a lot of momentum in the second song, “New Dark Ages,” which is slow and repetitive, without any of the sections possessing enough individual strength to justify the length of time for which they are played.

Throughout New Dark Age one can feel a heavy Pink Floyd influence that is highlighted by the many samples of Pink Floyd interviews and is further confirmed in many interviews with Greaves. This influence is fully realized by the last two tracks: “Echoes – Pt 1” and the subsequent “Echoes – Pt. 2,” which are in fact a faithful cover of the Pink Floyd song of the same name, except featuring lengthier noise improvisation builds. Here the strength of the original composition remains but little is done to give the song new life when compared to the original version. Viewed as a more of a Pink Floyd tribute it is easier to understand the direction the album takes, however, other than a strong opening track, there is little to attract the listeners attention or justify the record as a free standing entity.