After replacing their lead singer, the reborn metal duo Cobalt make their best-ever record, as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs.
When do you last remember a respected band replacing a lead singer and actually getting better? This is the central anomaly of the brilliant and brave Slow Forever, the first album in seven years from the reborn metal duo Cobalt. For a decade, Cobalt made mad, warped dashes through black metal, summoning the spirit and language of hero Ernest Hemingway alongside the imagery and intensity of singer Phil McSorley’s stints in the U.S. Army. But without McSorley, Cobalt has opened its sound, fully embracing the blues, country, hardcore, and hard rock strains that have long been latent in its music. Slow Forever is as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs all anchoring this eighty-minute maelstrom. It is an electrifying, enthralling opus.
Two years ago, it seemed Cobalt would never make another record. Half a decade had passed since the pair’s landmark Gin, when, in March 2014, McSorley announced he was out; a month later, he was back in, set to work on new material with childhood friend and Cobalt co-founder Erik Wunder. But in December of that year, McSorley took a series of brutally misogynistic, homophobic online shots at other bands. Wunder cut him loose. In retrospect, it seems like serendipity, as Lord Mantis, Charlie Fell’s manic sludge band from Chicago, was publicly splitting at the seams, too. Wunder asked Fell—"the only guy that came to mind when I thought about somebody who could replace Phil," he has said—to enlist. They spent the third quarter of 2015 reinventing Cobalt in a Colorado recording studio.
Those fraught beginnings ripple through Slow Forever, where the songs stem from abject depravity, or from a mindset where nothing goes right and hope is only a useless four-letter word. Images of drug abuse, sexual frustration, emotional exhaustion, self-mutilation, wanton violence, and outright dejection flash by one by one, suggesting a Charles Bukowski biopic produced by David Cronenberg. "I am not a man/I am just a dog," Fell shrieks and repeats above clattering drums and bullying guitars within the first six minutes. "Condone the act of self-destruction," he roars much later, with militant drums and a clarion riff buttressing his pronouncement. "A ritual/And bury it, bury it in the veins of lovers." Fell paints a sort of cosmic portrait with these very human flaws and faults. These failures—the "pinnacle of the archetype," as he puts it at one point—are the natural order, the way it will always be. "The past in a pile of ash, forgotten in the cycle," he offers by way of summary.
Even during instrumental interludes and extended introductions, Cobalt seems to be preparing for conflict, for coming face-to face with the demons inside Fell’s words. "Beast Whip," a song about perpetual dissatisfaction, batters its subject with a series of blast beats and D-beats; Fell seems to be screaming at his own thoughts, demanding more from himself. When "Elephant Graveyard" takes up the cycle of addiction, the music illustrates the mania by inciting a circle pit before fading into a long, slow comedown.
Fell is more versatile and nuanced than McSorley, his predecessor. His work here even suggests a range and finesse that his time in Lord Mantis didn’t, firmly establishing him as one of metal’s great new vocalists. During "Cold Breaker," he launches from a hardcore yammer to a doom-metal roar, alternately summoning the Dead Kennedys and Eyehategod as the music shifts around him. When he emits pained, animalistic screams or haunting, ghostly yells, he’s horror-film terrifying. But he’s not averse to fists-up, muscles-clenched chants, either, and those are what make Slow Forever so unexpectedly approachable. For "King Rust," he returns to a credo—"Hoisting myself out of myself," shouted in a staccato clip and enunciated so that it sticks. It feels motivational, inspiring. "Ruiner" hinges on a duet between Fell’s voice and Wunder’s winding riff, the two trading lines like they’re in Thin Lizzy. Of all the things Cobalt or Lord Mantis ever were, "catchy" was never one of them. On Slow Forever, Wunder and Fell, gleefully grim, stumble into that territory.
Cobalt’s albums have always depended upon a sense of ultimate urgency—life or death, do or die, kill or be killed. Because of the circumstances around its creation, Slow Forever felt that way before it was finished; had Wunder bungled Cobalt’s restart without McSorley, he would have looked like the fool who just didn’t know when or how to stop. Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced.
