Some music immediately grabs you by the lapels and gives a good shake, and that’s certainly the case with the progressive kind of metalcore that Cobra The Impaler dish out. After setting the world alight with their debut album [2021’s Colossal Gods] they continue to stoke the flames with their sophomore effort Karma Collision. Featuring ten tracks of skull crushing metal, this is an album that finds the band honing their craft to produce a timeless record that will still sound fresh and exciting many years hence.
Attesting to a sense of urgency, there’s no time to waste on fancy introductions or other niceties, just a wrecking ball of a riff that swings menacingly from speaker to speaker. A musical bulldozer clearing all in its path, ‘Magnetic Hex’ certainly makes its presence felt. Yet don’t take the band’s brute strength for a mindless, visceral assault; the bands technical bent is very much in evidence here and it gives proceedings a cerebral edge. The riffs are cyclical and, like a Buddhist chant, slowly ingratiate themselves into your soul until they become part of your physiology. In fact, Karma Collision is a riff-centric album and those huge chords, standing vast and immobile, are the totem around which the album revolves. That, of course, is a good thing and songs such as ‘Magnetic Hex’ are huge and immovable; they’re hulking, brutalist structures built in worship of some strange deity that leave the listener dwarfed in their shadow.
Unlike some of their peers, Cobra The Impaler are for from generic and there’s moments of light to contrast their shade, and no more so than on acoustic interlude ‘Eye Of The Storm’. It’s an airy suite, poetry without words, which transports the listener to another dimension before the crashing title-track wakes us from our reverie like a splash of cold water in the face. It means ‘Karma Collision’ appears with little warning, and a bullet racing towards your temple, it is all the more powerful for it. With singer Manuel Remmerie and bassist Michele De Feudis delivering a twin vocal attack, a duality is created that will reverberate throughout the record; light and shade, loud and quiet, visceral and cerebral, these are motifs that decorate the album and turn this metalcore album into a baroque beauty. Pulling all these various strands into a collective whole, ‘Shifting Sands’ makes for a cataclysmic conclusion, ensuring Karma Collision won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
With all but ‘Eye Of The Storm’ clocking in at over four minutes, these songs aren’t quick sugar fixes, rather they are steady energy releases, and that makes them all the more satisfying. Karma Collision finds Cobra The Impaler on an upward curve, and should propel them towards the biggest stages.
- Karma Collision is released via Listenable Records on 31st May 2024.
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Track List:
1. Magnetic Hex
2. Godless Beyonder
3. Season of the Savage
4. Eye of the Storm
5. Karma Collision
6. My Inferno
7. The Fountain
8. The Message
9. Assassins of the Vision
10. Shifting Sands
