Untitled Document
To call the Detroit
Cobras a cover band is not inaccurate, but it misses the point. Although
it’s true that the Cobras’ repertoire consists almost entirely
of other people’s songs — their fourth and latest full-length, Tied & True, contains not
one original track — the Motor City outfit hardly fits the cover-band
stereotype. Essentially the cover band’s M.O. is to play songs that
people recognize and do one of two things: either reproduce the familiar
version as closely as possible, in the tradition of countless tribute bands
and wedding-reception hired guns, or attempt to improve on, update,
deconstruct, or reinvent the source material. Although one act implies
self-denial and the other self-assertion, both depend on one crucial
condition: that someone recognize the act of appropriation. Without some
conception of the way the song is supposed to sound, would the drunken
bridesmaid bellow “Freebird” all night long and, at the
fulfillment of her request, clamber onto the crepe-festooned table for an
impromptu air-guitar solo? Or when the indie-band du jour launches into a sloppy Syd
Barrett cover during the second encore, how, without any prior knowledge,
would the insecure rockdudes exchange the all-important “Dude,
I’ve got this on vinyl” glances, the ocular handshake of the
hipster elite? In other words, what happens if a band plays a cover and no
one realizes it?
The Detroit Cobras have made a career of answering
that question. Core members Rachel Nagy and Mary Ramirez don’t
categorically shun well-known material (Tied
& True offers a raucous version of
Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone,” a song that
any self-respecting Beatles fan knows by heart), but the bulk of their
selections seem designed to stump all but the most hardcore of vinyl
fetishists. For every listener who can identify “As Long as I Have
You” as a Bob Elgin/Norman Meade composition popularized by Garnet
Mimms, there are a few hundred who have no idea who those people are. And
who cares? Archivists of the unjustifiably obscure, the Cobras come off
like pop apostles in thrall to forgotten messiahs, not like pathetic geeks
who need to impress people with their awesome record collections. Sure,
it’s an entertaining parlor game, comparing and contrasting one
performance with another, but rock & roll doesn’t belong in the
parlor, chumps. Sleazy, soulful, and fiercely economical, Tied & True, like previous
Cobras releases, is the kind of music whose true element is the smoky dive.
Nagy’s voice, a gutbucket growl marinated in cigarettes and bourbon,
isn’t perfect — her runs are blurry in spots, and the lower end
of her range is a barely audible rumble — but it has more hardboiled
moxie than a Barbara Stanwyck double feature. It’s also the perfect
complement to Ramirez’s greasy garage-rock licks, her unmistakably
Detroit-steeped mixture of girl-group grandeur and R&B grit. The rest
of the band, which includes drummer Kenny Tudrick, bassist Carol
Schumacher, and co-guitarist Greg Cartwright, isn’t superfancy, but
it gets the job done, almost invariably before the three-minute mark. With
its jabby little hooks and lurching rhythms, “If You Don’t
Think” has a propulsive pell-mell fury, and the equally adrenalized
“Leave My Kitten Alone” is as dirty as a catfight in a
truck-stop restroom. But the album also finds the Cobras exploring slower,
more vulnerable territory, as on the piano-kissed “Try Love”
and the hypnotically vampy “Puppet on a String.” When
Nagy’s voice cracks and breaks on “You’ll Never
Change,” it achieves the Platonic ideal of horndog pathos, a rallying
cry to every sadomasochistic, co-dependent, sorry-ass fool who ever
drunk-dialed an ex. Tied and True, indeed.
Contact René Spencer Saller at rssaller@core.com.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2007.
