End-time balladeers
Crippled Black Phoenix deliver an album of dazzlingly apocalyptic prog rock on their fifth offering, (Mankind) The Crafty Ape. Digging deep into their musical DNA, they tap into the rich rock heritage of the U.K. as they blend the atmosphere of
Pink Floyd, the bashing blues of
Led Zeppelin, and the eclecticism of
Jethro Tull into one brooding package. This combination makes the album a kind of "prog without borders" that allows the band to get muscular on tracks like "Born in a Hurricane" without taking away from the lonely sprawl of "(Dig, Bury, Deny)" in the process. Over the course of the album's two discs (which, in classic prog fashion, are broken up into three chapters), the band continues to show that there's more to writing an epic album than just fiddling around with delay pedals until you've hit the release phase of the tried-and-true post-rock formula. Filling empty spaces with slide guitars, swirling organs, and horn sections, the album has a real sense of grandeur that you just don't get from letting reverb do all the heavy lifting. With so much going on, (Mankind) has a kind of hopeful desperation about it, as if
Crippled Black Phoenix are putting everything out there so that when the end of days that their songs evoke finally arrives, no one can accuse them of holding anything back in the face of certain doom. ~ Gregory Heaney