Iceage Cobra

Brilliant Ideas From Amazing People

(In Music We Trust)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

The New York Dolls are back in business, and Iceage Cobra sounds like they could have been formed under the mission statement of opening for the Dolls.  Loud and brash and libidinous—but in a safe, retro sort of way—the Cobra coils back and strikes with chunky riffage, deliberately hammy lyrics, and some beer-hoisting rock anthems.   Brilliant Ideas is the sort of thing you want playing when your carload is cruising the streets in search of the one bar in your city that still lets people smoke inside.

It’s all in good fun—and, given the right place and time, can be good fun for the listener, too.  (If you’re in the mood to, say, reflect, then forget it.)  Take “Tornado of Knives,” which, in addition to being called “Tornado of Knives,” pumps in stadium-sounding crowd noise for its ‘70s-fueled guitar intro.  Like the opener, “We Gotta Drive,” it’s kept taut and under three minutes; things get a little stranger when the Cobra ventures off into longer running times.  The good news is that they seem well aware that a dozen regurgitations of “Tornado of Knives” would send live audiences to the bar and home audiences to the eject button.  Their attempts to spice it up are mixed; one of the least successful but most interesting examples is “We’re Gonna Win Some Money,” which goes into some jazzy noodling but first starts with some quick patter over a “ah-ah-ooo, ah-ah-ooo-ooo” harmonies that—please God, intentionally—are reminiscent of that “Numa Numa” song that inspired that one wonderful chubby dude to webcam dance his way into YouTube’s Hall of Fame.

You can’t go wrong with something called “Sensual Interlude”—well, actually you can…twice.  The first one starts with a numbingly repetitive honky-tonk piano that eventually gives up the floor to some Frampton masturbation, which wasn’t cool even when Frampton originally did it, and doesn’t warrant any kitschy resuscitation.  The second “Sensual Interlude” is a minute of momentum-busting between the aforementioned bizarro-jam “We’re Gonna Win Some Money” and the smokin' Guitar Hero aspirations of “Deathmobile,” one of the album’s standouts.