By Andrew Bansal
San Francisco doom/sludge duo Black Cobra have been destroying eardrums and marauding stages for nearly 15 years, and even as a mere two-piece, have developed a reputation as one of the most devastating bands in the metal underground. Black Cobra signed to Season Of Mist in 2015, and will be releasing their long-awaited fifth full-length album ‘Imperium Simulacra’ on February 26th 2016, their first since the 2011 effort ‘Invernal’. Maintaining what’s been a rigorous touring schedule for several years, comprising headline runs as well as support slots for a variety of bigger acts, Black Cobra are now raring to invade North American ears and minds once again, on a tour with Yob. Recently, they also did a short West Coast run and played a headline gig at Complex in Glendale in late August. Before the show, I spoke to drummer Rafael Martinez for an interview. Enjoy the conversation below, and catch them on tour with Yob (dates included).
Rafa, you’re on a short run of dates here, 8 shows in 10 days, and you’re coming towards the end of it. How’s it been so far?
Really good! We mainly did it for Total Fest in Missoula, Montana. This is the last year they’re doing it, so just figured we’d do a run of the Pacific Northwest and come down here through SoCal. But yeah, it’s been great! It’s been four years since the last release and we’re getting ready for the next one, but kids are still coming out to the shows, which is cool.
You are used to do much longer tours, so it must be a refreshing change to do a short run and just give it your all.
Yeah, we were in Europe for about three-and-a-half weeks and we were just in Australia for two weeks. For overseas tours it depends, because sometimes you just do a festival and come back. We usually go for at least a month or six weeks. But this is cool, it’s close to home and it’s not a big trek. It’s been fun!
You obviously have lesser number of members than most other bands. How much of a difference does that make? Is it less stressful to tour? You don’t have many people to carry with you, and when you do bigger tours you can carry more crew members.
Yeah, for these tours it’s just Jason and I. We pack up and get in the van. But we also have to do more work. There’s less people to carry equipment, and we have to do all the driving and all the loading in and out, selling the shirts, dealing with the club people, everything. But it’s fun, we don’t mind it. It’s part of the job, part of being in a band.
As you were saying, you’re getting ready for the new release. How far along are you with that next album?
It’s done, we finished recording in June, mastered it in June, and just finished the artwork today. So yeah, it’s pretty much all wrapped up and ready to go. It’s coming out on Season Of Mist on February 22nd, and we’re doing a tour before that with Yob across the United States for about a month in October and November. It’s great because they’re old friends of ours and we love playing with them. So, that should be fun.
That’s awesome, man. The last time I saw Black Cobra was at the Satellite in the summer of 2014, and even at that show you played some new songs which are probably going to be on this next album. So, does it help you to play them live first before you go into the recording process, to know what to do with them?
Yeah, playing the song live is the hardest way to do it, when you’re at gunpoint, basically, and you have to do it perfect. We’ve got one new song that we’re playing today, but we don’t want to give it all away, so we’ll wait till the album comes out to play all of it. We’ll have a whole new set then.
You’re four albums deep into your career, and every album you have done something to progress from the hardcore sludge style that you started out with. At this point, what are your ambitions? Are you happy with what you’re doing?
There are so many aspects of metal and heavy music, even just speed-wise, sometimes it can go really slow and at other times it’s really fast. But there are so many dynamics that you can explore, different kinds of grooves and dimensions, and on the new album there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve never done before. Not necessarily technical, but just different. For me, playing drums at least, I wrote a lot of drum parts that I couldn’t play when I came up with them and it took me a couple of months to push myself to up the bar to be able to do it. Every album I have a bad habit of doing that, writing things I can’t play. I make it really hard for myself (laughs). But I’m really stoked. When we were recording, it was still us, we had our identity as Black Cobra and that was our sound. What we’re doing is so proto-metal, but it’s progressive too, and we can take it pretty much everywhere. We’ve never been pigeonholed as a doom band or a thrash band, even though we like playing all kinds of stuff. I’m really excited to play the new songs live, definitely.
You’ve toured with a variety of bands over the years. Have you noticed that you’ve been well-received by all kinds of crowds because of the fact that you play a lot of different things?
Yeah, but you just never know. We toured with Pelican and that was one of the first big tours that we did and their fans really liked us. We went on tour with The Sword, we didn’t know what their crowd was going to be like, but they liked us a lot and it was really cool, and it was the same even with Kyuss Lives. People that like that kind of music, I’m sure they have Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath in their collection, so they identify with some of that, and I think that comes across no matter who we’re playing with. We’ve toured with bands like Torche, Corrosion Of Conformity, Weedeater, and Acid King. I used to play bass in Acid King, so there’s obviously a lot of that kind of music in Black Cobra. But you never know what the crossover is going to be like. You just go up there and do your best.
When tours come to you, specially with bigger bands, do you just go out and do it, or have you sometimes refused tours as well?
We can always say No, and we’ve been offered a lot of tours with bigger bands that seemed like a great opportunity, but we didn’t do them because I know from experience and from friends of mine that opened up for bands in front of thousands of people and didn’t sell a shirt. Nobody liked them, they had a horrible time. In such cases the morale factor drops, you know. You’re not appreciated for the entertainment that you’re providing and the music that you’re playing. So, we’d rather stay home and wait for something else or we just go out by ourselves. There’s always going to be tours. You can’t live in fear of that tour offer being the only opportunity that you’re going to have.
In your opinion, is it easier and more profitable to do smaller tours because you don’t have to price-match your merch items? I’m sure that also comes into factor.
Yeah, sometimes they outweigh each other. The downside of bigger tours is the price-matching but the upside is that you’re playing in front of a hell of a lot more people. It’s a little bit of a tougher sale, definitely. When you’re headlining, you call the shots, it’s your show, you can do whatever you want, and it’s a completely different thing. But sometimes you’ve got to step out of your comfort zone to grow and to expose your music to new crowds.
You mentioned a lot of names already, of bands that you’ve toured with. But what would be your ultimate aim, specially in terms of stepping out of your comfort zone, of bands that you would want to tour with?
You know, Harvey Milk would be really cool. We’ve looked up to them for a long time and they’re a band we really like. They are very eclectic and very odd. The Melvins would be cool too. We’ve done a couple of shows with Big Business but we’ve never toured with them, and I think that would be a good match. At Total Fest in Missoula we hung out with Jared for a little bit. Yeah, off the top of my head those would be the bands. But I mean, I’d love to tour with Pink Floyd or something like that (laughs)
After this tour, you’re doing that tour with Yob, and the album comes out next year. That’s all you have planned for the time being?
Yeah, we pretty much get home this week and we have a show in the first week of October, then a full month with Yob finishing around Thanksgiving. And then it’s only three months after that when the album will come out, and we’ll do a world tour again, probably starting in the States. I think we’ll do the festivals in the summer in Europe this time around, and then we’ll see what opening slots are available. We might go to Australia and Japan again.
You guys do well in Australia and Japan. You go there a lot!
Those kids love it! They write to us all the time asking when we’re coming back. It’s different cultures too. The way people value their music is totally different, specially when you’re coming from so far away. It’s like that in some parts of Europe too. When you get to Eastern Europe, a lot of the poorer countries never get a lot of music from the United States and California, so they are very appreciative of it and they definitely like it when you show up. It’s hard to go all the way out there. We just played in Hungary, in Budapest. We’d never been there before. When you’re looking at the map, Sarajevo and Bosnia are right there, you know you’re far, man! But they know about you and they want you to play there, and that’s very cool.
And lastly, doom has had quite a resurgence of late, specially in the States. A lot of bands are reuniting and becoming popular again. I know you’re not exactly a doom band per se, but have you seen this make any impact on you at all?
It has. Our first release came out nine years ago in 2006, although we’d been a band for years before that. We played a couple of shows with Sleep, we toured with High On Fire and Neurosis, and something like Sleep coming back is shedding a light on things that happened 20 years ago that a lot of people weren’t there to see. Sleep were so legendary, and even though at the point when they broke up, they weren’t huge but their legacy kept living on for 20 years and it just made people more interested. Like, Bongzilla all of a sudden is playing again. I remember when I used to play in a band called 16, we did a tour with them and Mastodon in 2003. But yeah, it’s cool. There is a lot of great music that sometimes gets overlooked for whatever reason, and it’s hard to keep the band going. It’s sad when kids don’t get to see it. Sometimes it’s like, it happened in the past and let’s leave it there, like the Ramones, You either saw them or you didn’t. Their classic lineup isn’t going to get back together. But, now the cycle of bands is so much longer. Bands like Zeppelin lasted for only 9-10 years, but bands that came out 20 years ago are still playing and still relevant. There’s a certain timelessness to some music and no matter when it comes out, it still holds a lot of weight. For somebody like Sleep, it’s great that they are kicking ass now and playing all over the world. That’d be another band to tour with, and we’ve known those dudes for a while. But yeah, it’s a good time, man. There is a lot of good music coming out and there is an audience for it. A lot people are interested in it and appreciated it. Sometimes there could be great music but no one buys it and it’s sad when that happens. There’s always going to be crap out there, things that are not very authentic. But when there’s good, genuine music, people recognize it instinctively, and it’s great that it’s happening now.
Related: Review: Black Cobra, Behold! The Monolith & Solar Wimp Perform At Complex
Black Cobra links: website | facebook | twitter | instagram
Black Cobra North American tour dates with Yob:
10/22 Neurolux – Boise, ID
10/23 Area 51 – Salt Lake City, UT
10/24 Hi-Dive – Denver, CO
10/25 Bourbon Theater – Lincoln, NE
10/27 Turf Club – St Paul, MN
10/28 High Noon – Madison, WI
10/29 Reggie’s – Chicago, IL
10/30 Southgate House – Newport, KY
10/31 Beachland Ballroom – Cleveland, OH
11/01 Mod Club – Toronto, ON
11/02 Foufounes – Montreal, QC
11/03 Brighton – Boston, MA
11/05 Bell House – Brooklyn, NY
11/06 Underground Arts – Philadelphia, PA
11/07 Webster Hall (Marlin Room) – New York, NY
11/08 Metro Gallery – Baltimore, MD
11/09 Strange Matter – Richmond, VA
11/11 Tiger Mountain – Asheville, NC
11/13 Siberia – New Orleans, LA
11/14 Rudyard’s – Houston, TX
11/18 Club Congress – Tucson, AZ
11/19 Brick By Brick – San Diego, CA
11/20 Echo – Los Angeles, CA
11/21 Metro – Oakland, CA
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