Album Review: Cobra Starship - Night Shades

What can you say about Cobra Starship? 'Night Shades' takes on quite a different route to previous Cobra albums which is, unfortunately for the listener, dance heavy and content light. This is just a painful listen from start to finish. Gone are the days when Cobra Starship were a fun project for Midtown’s Gabe Saporta. ‘Night Shades’ does not have any of the indie/disco sensibilities of ‘Viva La Cobra’ which, in stark contrast, is jammed packed with sing-a-long dodgy dance-move-inducing tracks that make for guilty pleasures of die hard Midtown fans.

It’s probably fair to say that singing isn’t one of Victoria Asher’s strong points but they still let her have a good bash on 'Disaster Boy'. Saporta’s accompanying vocals are bearable, Asher’s - not so much. '#1Nite (One Night)' sounds like an identikit version of Taio Cruz’s 'Dynamite' and the less said about 'Fucked In Love' the better. 'You Make Me Feel...' sums up everything intolerable about this album: unoriginal beats, token nondescript female vocalist (in this case Sabi who claims to be the “baddest baby in the atmosphere”) and a nonsensical chorus. The songs eventually blend into one another to create a torturous 40 minutes of meaningless generic pop.

Look up ‘Sell Out’ in the dictionary and you will see a picture of Cobra Starship. Instead of continuing to write catchy tunes that make you want to air keytar, they’ve jumped ship and onto the closest bandwagon. Expect any respect you had for Gabe Saporta to be obliterated listening to this album. If you like bland mainstream radio dance music perhaps this is for you, but you’d probably be better off buying a David Guetta album.

0.5/5

'Night Shades' is out now on Decaydance Records.

Chantelle 'Kiki' Goodchild