Black Cobra
Bestial

Once, I had a friend. He played every trick in the book on me, I swear.

For instance, there was one time he got slapped by a wretched son of a bitch, in the bathroom of a filthy dive in Brianza, all after having lively and boisterously insulted an attractive girl with decidedly loose morals (I'd say practically subterranean, in every sense), skirting the boundaries of a lawsuit. He never understood anything, and I believe he never will, about the so-called process of deriving a "moral" from life experiences.

The moral (mine, that is), we lost touch permanently.

Yet, I will never forget what he exclaimed when he heard Black Cobra for the first time. And that affirmation sounded something like this: "Christ, what the hell... this is the heaviest stuff I've ever heard!" My dear friend, despite not getting many things right in life, found himself in that very moment.

He was right, at least for once. That was indeed the heaviest thing he had ever heard.

"Bestial," that's the name of this album, is much as the title evokes. But don't think you're dealing with the usual "metal-a-drone" band, because these people would be offended, and I don't think you'd like to hear them scream. After all, it's all the fault of minimalism gentlemen, there are those who know how to draw something from it, and those who would do much better to buy plots on Mars: and the people in question know how to exploit it (minimalism, and perhaps even Mars…). But what strikes me most is the straightforwardness of these people: no frills, no "baroque" elements, no trivialities to degener-ate. And there's your trademark: Black Cobra.

Black WHO?

Black Cobra, meaning a mantric ride on completely undefended skins; a flow of unconsecrated molten lead by Mayan shamans; a Dark Sun diving toward defenseless oceans of pure disgust. A monstrous altar on which to pour gallons of liquefied peyote. The abominable design of the unknowable.

That's who.

Among the eleven Lovecraftian tracks you'll find, many won't even give you time to be perplexed, which is to say overshadowed under the branch of the question: "but how the hell do they do it?" Simple gentlemen: the two minstrels in question, do nothing but Ride. What? But it's obvious! The wave of frantic and occult esoteric existence that populates this world. And the ticket will be punched precisely with "One Nine", an Inca statue of pure Orite that will crush bones and shatter ideas until sterilizing them by tumbling you over; track two "Thrown From Great Heights", and the heartbeat will approach breaking the world record; track three, "El Equis", and cataracts will be ripped open from the sky, to flood your mind with never-before-outlined psychic perversions; track four, "Beneath", will represent a wonderful slow-motion arcane pearl, to deceive you as the gentlemen wish; "Omniscent", will instead be a prelude to syncopatic Indian virulence; "The Cry Of Melora", track six, will appear to your eyes as a Phil-Melvinsian parable capable of relocating your house, "due to vibrations"; "Broken On The Wheel", probably the only truly reflective track on the album, comparable only to a castaway who finds refuge on a rock, will entertain you until the storm comes back to start again; "Sugar Water", track eight, radioactive like nothing before in the hypothetical stoner-doom landscape of the second millennium; "El Doce De Octubre", meditative and dreamlike, like a Vishnu Purana in deep meditation, rather profoundly abyssal; "Sombra De Bestia", a Siamese twin of the previous track, or its duplication; "Kay Dur Twenty", final track, a "friendly" conclusion, to remind you (or perhaps oblige you?) to remember to put on your gas masks the next time you dare to abuse this vinyl opiate.

If the Mayans, Kyuss, Electric Wizard, and Sleep ever performed communal orgiastic rites worthy of such fame, I believe Black Cobra would be their monstrous offspring, meant to continue the lineage in the most modern and up-to-date way possible. A chosen priest to conclude the last of the cycles.

Let Them come to you.