Makeup For The Silence

PropertyOfZack Review : : Cobra Starship

Cobra Starship mastermind Gabe Saporta has progressively toed closer to the pop waters over the course of his band’s first three albums. Cobra’s debut was seen by most as a sharp left turn from Saporta’s previous work with Drive-Thru punks Midtown, but while the brushes may have changed, the palate—big guitars with big hooks, frenetic energy and a heaping helping of sass—wasn’t really that unfamiliar. Even as recently as 2009’s Hot Mess, the band’s increasingly synth heavy sound was still supplemented with plenty of guitar muscle. It has been clear from the start of the Cobra Starship project that radio pop was Saporta’s ultimate goal; it’s only now, with the release of Night Shades, that he’s fully committed.

But pop is, at its utmost, an all-subsuming force; the largest personalities—the Lady Gagas and Katy Perrys and Cee-Lo Greens of the world—succeed most of all in that (nay, because that) they retain some small, visible portion of themselves after delivering the beast its tithe. Woe be to those of inferior stuff; does anyone expect that, say, Taio Cruz’s next twenty years will be any different than Jon Secada’s last twenty? On Night Shades, praise Saporta for mustering up the guts to jump on in; mourn his drowning.

Not that Saporta’s getting much help from the cavalry here. Single “You Make Me Feel…” features someone named Sabi according to the liner notes, but if it were really Cascada or Dev belting the hook instead, would anyone notice the discrepancy? House music has long been the province of the anonymous diva, but we haven’t seen this kind of vocal genericization in mainstream pop since the days of Cathy Dennis and Corina. Meanwhile, third-rate frat rapper Mac Miller drops a rhyme on “Middle Finger” that’s so lame, he’s moved to acknowledge its lameness in the very next line. These folks aren’t life preservers, they’re anchors.

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I don’t usually reblog my reviews I write for other sites here, but since this ties directly in to my last post, I thought it made sense to include it here, especially since it gave me the opportunity to elaborate a little on some of the stuff I touched on in the second-to-last paragraph of that previous post (though I do think there’s probably a lot more to be said on the matter).

[As always, you can find links to this and all my other reviews on the Links page]

Source: propertyofzack