Sweet Cobra - Forever Review
by Mark Hensch
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With a name like Sweet Cobra, a band better be capable of knocking out some teeth. Thankfully, this Chicago quartet does plenty of just that on their sophomore effort Forever. Throughout the album's course, Sweet Cobra knocks 'em dead with songs that range from the gnarly to the catchy, the wicked to the fun. Hovering somewhere between filthy sludge and anathemic hardcore, Forever is like a shot of adrenaline the morning after a night of taking Quaaludes.
Like any decent sludge band, Sweet Cobra buries their sound beneath a mire of molasses-thick grime. Unlike just any old sludge band, Sweet Cobra takes this sound and makes it infinitely catchy. The hooks on here are popular rook quality memorable, and what makes things even more interesting is that never once does Forever lose its inherent testosterone levels. This makes for quite an experience – hearing Forever is like watching a beautiful sculpture slowly sink into a tar pit.
Opening cut "Road Born Orphan" immediately displays some of this dichotomy, the blistering track exhibiting several layers of metal's substratum. On the one hand, the song is a raw death 'n roll behemoth that sounds like a punk version of Entombed. On the other, "Orphan" lays down some sickeningly thick sludge breakdowns, all of which contain gripping melodies.
Things get even weirder as Forever progresses. "Spider Scraper," for instance, takes a fragile guitar melody and welds it into a chilling sludge riff. The end result is a stark, disquieting cut – one gets the feeling of waking up hung over under a pile of snow. "Luddite," meanwhile, messes around with a few queasy chords before belching out a twisting, turning serpent of noxious grooves. Last but not least, the epic that is "The Motherf*cker" chugs with crushing guitars worthy of Mastodon while pouring out visceral emotion on the same scale as Cave In. The end result is something trippy yet frighteningly real, that kind of song that messes with heads while tugging at hearts.
Long story short, Forever does not feel like a long time when done by a band like Sweet Cobra. Seeing as the songs balance dirty rancor equally with powerful emotional expression, everything flies right on by. By album's end, listeners will no doubt feel as if they just woke up in a pool of vomit, only to remember the night of drunken revelry before. It is a conflicted emotion, one that is both traumatizing and joyous. If that sounds like fun, pick up Forever and see just how Sweet this Cobra really is. The correct answer – at least in my humble opinion – is a lot.
Sweet Cobra's Forever
Road Born Orphan
F*cking Fertilizer
Chopping Block
Spider Scraper
Jackals & Arabs
Luddite
True Crime, True Criminal
The Motherf*cker
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Sweet Cobra - Forever Rating:8.5
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