Full Circle

by johnny ray huston
Cobra jewel

AGEE, KAEL , Ferguson, and Farber have their allure, but my favorite piece of film criticism remains Jack Smith's "The Perfect Film Appositeness of Maria Montez." In his highly contagious zeal for all things pertaining to 1940s movie queen Montez, Smith unfurls one jewel-spangled sentence after another, forming an argument that fundamentally changes the way one views movies. "To admit of Maria Montez validities," Smith writes, "would be to turn on to moldiness, Glamorous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naïveté, and glittering technicolored trash!" Each time I read Smith's essay, I'm possessed by an urge to strive for the color and momentum of his exhortations, and chastened by his assault on critics and their conventional assumptions – their allegiance to words rather than visuals, their obedient reverence for mere "seriousness," "importance" and "GOOD PERFS."

Montez's great apotheosis was 1944's Cobra Woman, the double-your-pleasure adventure that finds her embodying twin sisters, one good, the other an evil cobra priestess. I don't know if the pair of German women who make up the group Cobra Killer know anything about Montez or Smith, but I do know that the "Montez outrages and embarrassments" Smith was enraptured by are alive, kicking, and screaming in Gina V. D'Orio's and Annika Line Trost's sonic symbol world, a free-floating space where pretty melodies are sliced in half by careening chunks of audio wreckage. Just as Montez broke and rewrote the rules about what an actress does, Cobra Killer redefine music. Or declare all-out war on it.

On their 2000 debut album, D'Orio and Trost, breaking free from the male-dominated groups (EC80R and Shizuo) they'd been involved with, distinguished themselves as the most imaginative act on the then-thriving Digital Hardcore label. While labelmates such as Atari Teenage Riot assaulted with technology, Cobra Killer assaulted technology itself, generating samples so muffled that they seemed like kids with ADD bootlegging a great '60 garage band playing in another room. How to produce a new album that sounded like an eighth-generation dub of a cheap old cassette? Cobra Killer had the magic answer; whether they were making noises or stealing them, the resulting sound quality was never less than completely crappy. And as for structure – what structure? Dissonant repetition barely cohered around their bratty shouts. Sounds went in and out of sync. The overall effect was like switching AM channels and never quite finding a song amid the blizzards of static – instead, some taunting voices seemed to possess the radio, following a listener no matter where he or she went on the dial.

And that was exactly the trick – Cobra Killer controlled the dial. On a whim, they'd turn an entire instrumental track by someone else into mere background music for their tossed-off vocals. Five years later, their debut still sounds unique, and it contains at least one passage of sheer genius: "Six Secs" (get it?), which finds them dueting with Don Covay's Stax classic "Sookie Sookie."

Cobra Killer's latest album, 76/77 (Monika), is a comparatively hi-fi affair. Still, the songs often stutter, slip, stop, and stutter again before switching back into the right gear. Midway through "Needle Sharing" (with a title like that, a lyric about being "together forever" isn't exactly romantic), a completely different song threatens to invade, before D'Orio and Trost shut the door on it. They begin 76/77 with "Let's Have a Problem," which is another way of saying they're looking for trouble. They end it with "Yes, I'm Finished," deadpanning a series of put-downs ("I drive a Porsche and you a truck") that would make Roxanne Shanté proud. In between, there's Comic Strip-era Serge Gainsbourg sped up from 45 rpm to 78 ("Chemie des Alltags"), Southern Culture on the Skids turned into beach-party music ("L.A. Shaker"), a song where the title – "Tenthousand Tissues" – is good enough to be the entire lyric, and an aerobic anthem of sorts in "Cobra Movement," which begins with an exercise instructor helpfully noting that the titular action "is not a push-up."

If you find Chicks on Speed too dutifully art school, and Le Tigre too prescriptive, then Cobra Killer – who outdid electroclash before it even existed, who turn Thee Headcoatees techno, and whose live shows involve baths in red wine – are for you. Kathleen Hanna and company have never come up with a riff as powerful as the one on "Heavy Rotation," a space-age surf rock number that seems to beam in and out of different dimensions through a ray gun that verges on malfunction. You can keep your stale Peaches next to equally stale post-Biggie Lil' Kim. 76/77 is the best pop album to come out of Germany since Stereo Total's Jukebox Alarm.