Cobalt - Slow Forever (2016)

Slow Forever is the coming back of Cobalt, seven years after the excellent "Gin". This time Erik Wunder has a new vocalist, Charlie Fell (ex-Lord Mantis). Fell is doign a great job, sounding absolutely feral and hungry. The vocals are maybe the most black metal element, there's very few blastbeats, the album being mostly mid tempo. The riffing is also not especially black metal, except in a general way, in creating a dark and epic feel. We could say it's between black metal and sludge, sometimes also not very far from early Mastodon. But being somewhat "generic modern extreme metal" is not a weakness for Cobalt because if they are not belonging to a specific style is because what comes forward is that it really have its own style, strong and unique. After my first listens to the album I intended to write that it would have needed some editing, it's a double album, with long songs, and it took me some time to really get into it. But I changed my mind, now I realise that it's really a grower, the more I listen to it the more I like it and enjoy the different subtleties and the whole atmosphere of the album, with the "americana" element, together with the epic songwriting, again bringing something strong to the music, evoking wild and violent american lands, Cormac MacCarthy coming to mind (I know Hemingway and Hunter S.Thompson are the main inspiration in litterature for Cobalt, but still...).
So Slow Forever is really a worthy addition to Cobalt discography, a very strong and enjoyable album.

The Bandcamp page.