TRACK LISTING

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*Comments:

1.  Avalanche
2.  Somnae Tenebrae
3.  Corrosion Fields
4.  The Crimson Blade
5.  Beyond
6.  Erebus Dawn
7.  Abyss
8.  Obliteration

Total playing time: 39:41

Release Date: October 23, 2011
Label: Southern Lord Records

Black Cobra - Invernal

Reviewer: Chris

October 23, 2011

L.A. sludge masters Black Cobra re-emerges from the depths of the Chronomega album with this murky collective of quick and doomy disfigurement called Invernal, which attempts tell the story of a “post-apocalyptic trek to a nuclear infested and mutated Antarctica”. So far, after being dragged kicking and clawing into the awesomeness of the first track “Avalanche” I’m pretty sold on what happens from here on out. It’s a better-polished entry into some things disturbing and surreal.

The music on Invernal is quite a trip into this painted wasteland of cold tundra that has been scarred and left for dead, and the tones and chords used throughout the album accomplish a feeling of total despair and chaotic abandonment. Jason Landrian emits a vocal that is a brash and insensitive tonality that is meant to make you uncomfortable and aware of the horrors around you. If the descriptive design is the intended formula here then the band implements this to an incredibly vital height. This is an album to ingest in totality; there should be no stops or interruptions because it moves like a carefully-pieced short film that paints eerie and discerning pictures of a forlorn land that lay in ruins as disorder runs amuck with irreverent glee. The music itself can be unorganized in its base form, with guitars shredding like dull razors over copper wire, but if you really revel in its natural issuance you can certainly find it an impeccably-organized journey within the safety of your own visions. I’m sure that’s precisely what Black Cobra had in mind with this.

“Beyond” is one of those tracks that you can’t describe without vying for some adjective to help you along the way. It’s a ballistic trampling through drop-tuned discord that speaks volumes about the bleak and diseased present tense depicted in these chords. When the end music speeds up in accordance with the lyrics you really get the feeling of some apocalyptic battle, whether it’s within of external. It’s here that I really like Landrian’s voice; it covers a range of harsh reality and crass ambivalence that is pretty hard to find fault with in this setting. It’s the perfect vocal accompaniment to such a disturbing visage offered in the span of 40-minutes.

To say this record is a cerebral entity is widely superfluous; it’s not that you have to be overly intelligent to dig this, but it helps to be in touch with the inner plateaus of your chemical blueprint because this album can definitely take you places. At times the music sounds very ‘Sabbathy’, but the doom aspects are pretty basic when laid underneath all of this sludge. As a casual fan of this style, it’s a band like Black Cobra that affects me in such a way so as to seek out a similar style. The buzz saw feel of the E-chord pounding found in “Abyss” relies heavily on creating just such an image of some devastating gorge that has been left as uninhabitable, and you have to wonder if this fashioned visual is supposed to the mind that creates it.

This album is, if nothing else, a fascinating and unfamiliar trek into wonder and uneasiness that, much like the wastleland it describes, has fissures and chasms that you might not want to find but can’t help but seek out.