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Cobalt: Gin

15/06/09 || Khlysty

It is surprising – at least to me – how great, how important and how uplifting “Gin” can be. There’s an almost ritualistic, cleansing sense permeating the sick riffery and tribalistic drumming. There’s a sense that the two guys comprising Cobalt (Phil McSorley on vocals and lyrics and Erik Wunder on everything else) don’t, you know, just enter a studio to record their music, but that the recording process is just a culmination of a whole preparation procedure that contains soul-searing trials and tribulations, ecstatic joy and wonder and abysmal pain and hate.

I won’t go into details about the band (see for yerselves here, you lazy bastards), but I will tell you one thing: I think it’s good that the band doesn’t play live. If they did, the whole thing would end up in trance-like sequences containing blood sacrifice, orgiastic copulation and lots of ritualistic death and destruction. See, the seminal elements traced in their previous, stellar record (“Eater Of Birds”) seem to reach full fruition here, making “Gin” seem more like an experience than a piece of music. I mean, yeah, there are still black metal elements in the songwriting, but Wunder and McSorley have varied their attack in so many ways, that I’m still uncovering more details than I’m comfortable with.

First of all, McSorley’s vocal performance has taken a turn from cool black metal screeching to a more nuanced and more intense approach, giving the songs an uneasy edge –as if you suddenly realize that the guy sitting next to you in the subway, mumbling away to himself is more coherent than you thought and that the atrocities he’s describing are too real to be ignored. There’s a strange resonance in his inflection that goes beyond mere “artistic expression” and moves toward a bizarre audial cinema vérité vibe that’s too uneasy to merely shake off as posturing. And with the music in which he ejaculates his words, well, the music, boys and girls and all in between, is a beast all of its own.

It seems that when Wunder started composing “Gin”, he immersed himself into the progressive, tribalism-induced, mind-altering world of Neurosis and decided to recombine his black/thrash ideology with the Frisco titans’ Pink-Floyd-via-Swans mindfuck and see what will happen. Well, what happened was a creature of immense causticity, incredible beauty and inconceivable depth. That’s no black metal; that’s the sound that covers a mano-á-mano battleground, just minutes after the last foe has been vanquished, with the screams of death and blood-ecstasy still echoing in the scene.

This is no trolls-in-the-wood music, but a calculated attack towards body and brain: rhythmic changes that approach math-metal, serpentine riff-fuckery, martial-cum-ambient pieces, crusty punk that evolves into something not far from Swans tribal psychosis… man, it keeps coming and coming, changing, reconfiguring itself into shapes more and more alien, more and more scary in their intensity, more and more brilliant in its execution, more and more beautiful in its undiluted power.

I could tell you about how the songs seem to flow into a whole extremely bigger than its component parts. I could tell you about how much better as composer and musician Wunder has become. I could tell how Jarboe, once again, lends her majesty into one song (“Pregnant Insect”). About how expansive the scope of each song is and how economic the means to achieve this. About how a “chugga-chugga” part becomes a Tool-ish esoteric math-rock exercise (“Two-thumbed Fist”), only to end into a glorious black metal explosion. But, y’know, this is forest-for-the-trees crap: you gotta listen to this as a fucking whole. And, I mean, REALLY listen to it. Only then, will you be able to get what these guys have achieved.

So why do I give it only an 8,5 out of 10? Well, the way it ends really sucks my sweaty balls (hey, c’mon, it’s really hot here in Athens, Greece, y’know…). The penultimate track (“The Old Man who Lied for His Entire Life”) is an instrumental that really reminds me of a System of a Down song (or, at least, its intro, not exactly sure…) and after the tenth song we get a shitload (fucking fifty!) digitally edited tracks of silence before the record ends in a harrowing note, with the (real? not real? who gives a fuck…) field recording of a chain-gang song. I hate silent tracks, I don’t give a flying fuck if the number means something, I find it to be a stupid and totally useless trick.

Minor gripes aside, “Gin” is one of the records that restore my faith towards metal: it’s powerful, it’s venomous, it’s ugly, it’s smart, it’s beautiful, it’s unspeakably evil and incredibly transcendental. This is one liquor that you MUST sample. As for its effects, well, the band dedicates “Gin” to Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson. And those two dudes really knew how to handle their liquor. So, cheers, and let’s see what happens…

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Profound Lore Records
Website: Cobalt MySpace
Band
Phil McSorley: vocals, lyrics
Erik Wunder: everything else, vocals

Tracklist
01. Gin
02. Dry Body
03. Arsonry
04. Throat
05. Stomach
06. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
07. Pregnant Insect
08. Two-thumbed Fist
09. The Old Man who Lied for His Entire Life
10. A Starved Horror
…
66. hidden track

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