Among the numerous bands opening for Kyuss Lives! on Friday night, the San Francisco duo Black Cobra made a strong impression with their loud noise metal, as I had a hard time to comprehend how such a powerful and layered sound could only come from two people.
With their ‘Invernal’ album art for background, a sort of phantasmagoric landscape made of menacing gothic tree-dragons that could have come up directly from a scene from the Lord of the Rings, the vocals were savagely screamed above a wall of noise of distortion.
Jason Landrian on vocals and guitars and Rafael Martinez on drums were producing these aggressive and violent sonic tempests that were sometimes borrowing from hardcore punk, and they were looking like two guys fighting some natural element gone wild, inflaming the air of the Wiltern theater.
I am not sure I am qualified to differentiate all these metal genres, sludge metal, black metal, doom metal, stoner metal, but theirs was as powerful as a steamroller that would not stop, as loud as a horror movie monster, and faster than most of metal bands I have heard. It was also moody as there were a few brief pauses among these long stormy battles.
During their impetuous thick wall of punk metal noise, there was some serious head banging in the crowd, and the two guys did not stop much between their combative assaults until their set was done, producing this giant and quite cinematic sound. And with song titles like ‘Avalanche’, ‘Somnae Tenebre’, ‘Abyss’, I only imagine what the undecipherable lyrics could have said.