REVIEW: Crippled Black Phoenix - Sceaduhelm
Shades of darkness
66:13 // April 17, 2026 // Season of Mist
While Crippled Black Phoenix has covered a lot of sonic ground in over two decades of existence, I primarily approached their latest (typically intimidating) project, Sceaduhelm, through the lens of comparison and contrast with the group’s previous standard LP, 2022’s Banefyre. This was partly because I’d spent a lot of time with the latter and know it inside and out, but also because these two albums are two peas in a pod - sprawling records full of gloom.
Of course, gloom isn’t really in short supply anywhere in the Crippled Black Phoenix discography - frontman Justin Greaves may’ve (mostly) left aside doom metal despite his previous Iron Monkey and Electric Wizard stints, leaving this project to tinker with varying admixtures of post-rock, Gothic, and folk elements, but their songs are almost always rather depressive and sinister stuff.
Its album art adorned with a notably unnerving Man in the Moon image, Sceaduhelm comes advertised as a more reflective record exploring such themes “fatigue” and “burnout”, describing its atmospheric intent as “focusing on consequence rather than reaction”. In most ways, I can understand this description - relative to Banefyre’s tendency towards post-rock bombast, this latest offering feels restrained, content to mostly brood rather than rage and rant. Notable highlights manage to tap into this feeling of nocturnal exhaustion, if in different ways - “Dropout”, for example, as a left-field detour into weird darkwave aesthetics, feels like dancing bleary-eyed simply to keep from falling asleep, while the eerie “Under the Eye” anchors the album’s late stages as a dreamlike, bleak monument.
Those listeners (probably most) who found Banefyre too massive for realistic consumption are probably wondering whether Sceaduhelm’s reduced scope, if still formidable (over an hour) has resulted in a far more digestible product. The answer is nuanced - this latest album remains imposing, its moods reliably dark, and still with a bit of fat to trim (I’d say “The Void” and “Tired to the Bone” could be removed without much issue) - but this album does feel much shorter than its predecessor, in a good way, and the large majority of the tracklist is remarkably engaging.
Therefore, fluctuation of quality level isn’t a problem here - I do feel, though, that the album suffers a bit from a mismatch in the tone throughout. The weariness, the sense of things burning out slowly, of agonizing decay, which propels much of the material here rests quite uneasily against some of these songs. The most obvious “fish out of water” is “Vampire Grave”, an undoubtedly fun song, quite campy in its delivery,, but the energetic driving anthem that is “Ravenettes”, and the glorious ‘80s rock cheese of “No Epitaph - The Precipice” (“I wanna be, a better man, for youuuuu”) feel similarly incongruous. You’ll note that I enjoy all three songs, indeed, each is a highlight in its own way, but their more carefree and cartoonish sense of darkness rests doesn’t quite connect with the malevolent grimness which pervades many of the other tracks.
I warned you I’d be referencing Banefyre a lot, so here’s my overarching assessment of that massive effort - it was bloated, hard to listen to as a whole, contained one major mistake of a track (the opener/intro), and also provided me with a whole bunch of the most fantastic tracks I’ve heard this decade. I mention all that to let you know my general feelings on Crippled Black Phoenix - to my ears, they’re a wild card of a band, capable of brilliance and of duds, and with not quite enough of a filter to sort between them. Interestingly, that sense of missing quality control is much less evident on Sceaduhelm, perhaps simply because this is a significantly shorter album this time around, but I still can’t wholeheartedly love this record, as the vibe provides a sense of whiplash throughout. I love me some jovial horror-themed hard rock, and I love me some doom-encrusted post-rock balladry, and all the other variations presented herein, but the gap between the extremes presented on the same album cause Sceaduhelm’s central vision to waver a bit. I’d recommend Sceaduhelm wholeheartedly as a collection of nifty songs portraying differing shades of darkness - as a coherent album, it’s still worth your time, but my praise is less effusive.
7.5/10