Live Review : Crippled Black Phoenix + MØL + Impure Wilhelmina @ Rebellion, Manchester on September 9th 2022

Being a devotee of an underground and under appreciated band is rather like being a fan of a third-division football team. For one there is an awful lot of tedious travel involved. My incredibly unscientific poll (I heard a smattering of Scouse accents and spoke to people from as far afield as Leicester and Lancaster) showed that people had travelled from all over the northwest (and further) for tonight's show. Secondly, there is that gnawing loneliness caused by the fact that most of the time nobody else seems to really appreciate what you see in them.

However, there are also instances of complete and utter joy when you connect and interact with fellow enlightened disciples. Tonight's closing crescendo of Burnt Reynolds is one of those moments. It is a point in time of utter communal euphoria as fifty or so people who probably have never met before, bond together over their shared adoration of the same band and the same song. There is a life-affirming energy in finding other misfits who adore the same obscure outfit as you do, and I exit Rebellion with a feeling of utter joy dancing around my heart. But I'm skipping ahead here.

From the off, I am rather taken with openers Impure Wilhelmina simply because they remind me of the bands that shaped my fledgling musical tastes. There are dashes of Husker Du, generous dollops of Sonic Youth and plentiful sprinklings of My Bloody Valentine. They create off-kilter cathedrals of warped sound, designed solely to lose your soul within. Michael Schindl spends a good portion of the set standing at the lip of the stage with his eyes closed, seemingly creating a telepathic bond with the music that he is creating. As the sole person in the front row (they may well have been in operation since 1996 but they are still very much a hidden gem in this country) there are numerous occasions where I fear that he will inadvertently step off and I will have to catch him. 

They skillfully blend distortion with melody. With the hugest of compliments, the nearest comparison I can get is of an out-of-tune Suede. There are formulaic song structures at play here, but they are all slightly buckled and deformed. In the act of bending our assumptions, they have created something incredibly enticing and frankly interesting. Whilst aware of their formidable back catalogue, I would not call myself at the start of the set a fan, but (as photographic evidence proves) I find myself bewitched by the way that they carve a resolutely unique path through what we know as heavy music. The simple fact that they have been doing something so distinctively different for over 25 years needs to be applauded.

However, no matter how punch-drunk I am by the brilliance of Impure Wilhelmina, MØL quite simply blow everybody else out of the water. They are certainly the most powerful and absorbing band currently in existence. The emotion and the passion just flows out of their short but striking set. If vocalist Kim Song Sternkopf is not actually having a nervous breakdown live on the stage, then he deserves an Oscar for his performance. At the fiery heart of their intensity, is the fierce juxtaposition between the harshness of Kim's vocal delivery and the luscious beauty of the music his compatriots are creating. It's akin to someone screaming over a Cocteau Twins record and as Kim notes there is no language barrier when using screeches.

The point is that Kim's howls are not just monosyllabic noises, they are heart-wrenching cries of anguish. His pain and posturing further fuels the emotional intensity of their performance. This is not a band that holds back, instead for the 40 minutes that they are on stage, every single member ploughs every drop of their being and every fibre of their soul into the music that they make. It is like being caught in the eye of a hurricane. Discombobulating but also incredibly enticing and exciting. Whatever personal demons Kim is using his oral delivery to battle, he is not content to restrain his skirmishes solely to the stage. With a flippant retort of "do you want company?" he clambers into the pit and proceeds to stand in the middle of the floor screaming like a possessed banshee into his mic. Simultaneously astounding and intoxicating, there is not currently a live band like them. The collective feeling in the front as they exit the stage is the same as you get when you disembark from a terrifying rollercoaster, emotional drainage but also a desire to jump straight back on again.

For a band that is an international collective, Crippled Black Phoenix very much subscribe to that great British virtue of stoic resilience. Over the years they have made pulling victory out of adversity into an art form. On numerous occasions, their musical mastermind Justin Greaves has seemed on the verge of giving up and putting a sword to his creation, only for the band to then bounce back with new members, a renewed level of musical vigour and most importantly another absolute gem of an album. Even tonight they exhibit buoyant resistance as they battle against the gods of technical difficulties. On at least three separate occasions a seemingly shambolic cacophony of cries for changes to mixes and levels gives way to waves of pure and utter beauty.

The wondrous thing about Crippled Black Phoenix is that marriage of texture and complexity. As there is so much going on and so many people playing a part in the musical creation (there are eight members on stage including a saxophonist), it should come across as at least crowded if not messy. But instead, what they birth are musical movements of utter exquisiteness. There are serious subjects at play here, ranging from discourses on humanities slow decline towards oblivion (Lost) to resolute cries against animal cruelty (The Reckoning) but they are all delivered in such flourishes of enhanced splendour that you just can't help but be lost in the magnificence of their musical vision. There are passages where they are more Pink Floyd than Pink Floyd (especially within the title track of their 2018 masterpiece "Great Escape” and their interpretation of the latter stages of the lengthy Song for the Loved) but in the main, there is a grounded reality and earthiness to their brand of prog. It stays just on the right side of elaborate and self-absorbed. There is no soloing or showing off, instead, every musician plays an intrinsic but measured part in the building of their sonic tapestries.

Time soon runs away from us (there is an increasingly nervous crew of drum and bass enthusiasts standing at the side of the stage desperate to get on to build the DJ booth for tonight's late-night dan dance party in the venue) but the band still have more gems to bestow upon us. ‘You Take the Devil Out of Me’ has an almost country twinge in its delivery and ‘We have Forgotten Who We Are’ signals the start of a communal loving where the boundaries between band and audience are both broken and blurred. Jason seems generally moved by the adoration coming from the (almost) hometown crowd (earlier in the show he regaled his joy at the fact that his northern sense of humour could for once be both understood and embraced) and there is real emotion in the way he banters with the light-hearted hecklers.

The immovable curfew means that the façade of an encore is sacrificed and instead they ploughed straight into the aforementioned ‘Burnt Reynolds’. It is a thing of complete and utter beauty and the audience morphs into a single evangelistic unit of complete adoration. Nobody outside of the confines of Rebellion has probably heard of Crippled Black Phoenix but for eight and a half minutes they are the complete and utter centre of our combined universes. Jason chooses that moment to come and join the worshipping hordes and stands in the middle of the floor plucking out his gorgeous guitar solo. It is a moment of utter joy, where we are no longer musicians and punters and instead, we are all united in our adoration of music. But the moment has to fade as another cross-section of musical devotees have drum and bass they need to bob to, so in an almost anticlimactic fashion, the eight-strong ensemble are bundled off stage as soon as the last note is uttered. I love music but sometimes I forget just how emotive and enthralling it can be. Tonight, was one of those evenings where I have that belief not just replenished but enhanced.