Black Cobra
Invernal
Southern Lord

Invernal, the fourth full-length from Bay Area duo Black Cobra,  is every bit the cracked teeth, world swallowing, gaping Hell mouth I expected it to be, but the urgency and desire with which I have embraced its festering lips and drank in its putrid stench has surprised even me. The visceral battery of sludge Rafa Martinez (drums) and Jason Landrian (guitar and vocals) unleash sounds like Matt Pike taking a rusty-chained whipping from Kerry King and Tom Araya — and there’s only two of ‘em! Whether it’s Kurt Ballou’s production work or the band’s overwhelming desire to harness the force of charging thunder into suffocating black riffs, Invernal pounds out eight cuts of unrelenting rotten roll much braver, louder, and nastier than any Black Cobra album that’s come before. This here is proof that sludge doesn’t have to be prosaic, that it can attack you like a zombie ape and bite your fucking head off.

Listen to “Avalanche” from Invernal!

Black Sleep of Kali
Our Slow Decay
Small Stone

Debut album from Denver’s Black Sleep of Kali, which, despite its name, is a furious force of sludge metal devilry that’s more whack-a-mole doom than it is a slumbering death crawl. And it’s no easy feat keeping up that kind of  eternal energy with an average run time of six minutes for the eight songs laid down here, but I suppose anything is possible when you’re drawing your annihilation inspiration from a dark and violent goddess. Right, so it all rolls heavily along like an avalanche of Baroness worship, but the sonic assault of Our Slow decay isn’t without its groovy riffs, hardcore fluctuations, and punk metal aesthetics either, which makes for a fairly dynamic, anarchic listen that will not only knock your walls down but will piss on your rug, too. Definitely a big-balled gut bucket of bubbling black action, this one.

Listen to “The Crow and The Snake” from Our Slow Decay!

Buy Black Sleep of Kali’s Our Slow Decay from Small Stone!

In the first movie, you’ve got these six chicks, all of ‘em adrenaline junkies, who take a vacation in the Appalachian Mountains to go cave diving. Although it’s more like cave crawling, because these are unexplored caves without much room, see, and since the goal of these movies, as much as I can gather, is to make you squirm one way or another, they lean heavily on the claustrophobic button. So there they are, crawling through rocky cracks deep in the Earth’s belly, in these unmarked, unexplored caves (because that’s more of a thrill despite the fact that no one knows where you are) with dust, debris, and water falling all around them. They don’t really know where the hell they’re going, so they just keep making their way deeper and deeper. Then there’s a mini avalanche of some sort and their only way out has just been cut off. The rocks also fell on one of their equipment bags; the one with the rope, so that’s a major setback. Anyway, this shit goes on for about an hour, and will only really make you uncomfortable if you hate the dark and have a major fear of being trapped in a small space. Or buried alive. For everyone else it’s 60 minutes of watching six women crawl around in caves. But then, finally, the cave monsters show up.

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