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thisaintascenereviews · 7 years ago

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Album Review by Bradley Christensen Cobra Starship – Viva La Cobra Record Label: Fueled By Ramen Release Date: October 23 2007

I was browsing Amazon earlier this week (well, the week that I’m writing this, anyway), looking for other nostalgic albums to listen to, and I came across Cobra Starship’s sophomore LP, 2007’s Viva La Cobra, which was an album that I used to listen to quite a lot in my freshman year of high school. Here’s the funny thing, though – I never listened to any of Cobra Starship’s other albums, although to be fair, most people haven’t listened to their last couple of albums, either. After this LP, they signed to a major label, and they turned into a generic, lame, and forgettable pop / dance band, eventually breaking up a couple of years ago. Most fans remember their first two albums, though – 2005’s While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets and 2007’s Viva La Cobra, the latter of which I’ve heard, and that I’ll be talking about today. I’ve never heard While The City Sleeps, however, but even then, the album was essentially a solo record for frontman Gabe Saporta, who came to prominence in the early 00s with the pop-punk / emo band Midtown. I haven’t listened to them, either, but I need to do that sometime. I didn’t realize that Viva La Cobra came out in 2007, though, otherwise I would have revisited this LP first, because I loved this album during my freshman year of high school, like I said. I’m not sure if I picked this up when it came out, or sometime after, but I do remember listening to this in the winter of 2008, so I’m sure I picked it up shortly after it came out. Similarly to the last album I reviewed, Travie McCoy’s debut solo LP, 2010’s Lazarus, I don’t have my original copy of the album, but I haven’t listened to the album in years, so I’ve never been sure if the album would hold up. Throughout my nostalgic kick that I’ve been on, I’ve told myself one thing: even if the album itself doesn’t hold up, or that I don’t love it as much as I used to, not only is that to be expected, but it’s still been a lot of fun listening to these albums that are ten-plus years old.

Reactions have been mixed on a lot of albums that I’ve been into lately, but I have to be honest, Viva La Cobra has held up quite well, and it’s definitely one of my favorite albums that I’ve been “catching up with,” so to speak. Lazarus was a decent pop-rap album that had some good songs on it, but for the most part, the album was forgettable, generic, and lackluster. It wasn’t outright bad, but nothing that made me want to go back to it. Luckily, it was only about 35 minutes, but by the end, I was still exhausted from it, because of how generic it was. Viva La Cobra is the complete opposite of that LP in every single way, although this LP is just as short, only around 36 minutes. I’m surprised, though, because I didn’t think this album would hold up as well as it does. If I had listened to this just a few days sooner, I would have put this album on my list of ten underrated albums from 2007, but I could always make a part two. At the same time, though, this LP isn’t perfect. It’s got a few problems, but they’re nothing consistent, let alone run through the entire album. Cobra Starship was always a very unique band, because they mixed pop, rock, and dance music into a weird, unique, and odd sound that was never just one thing. I’d categorize them as a pop-rock band, just for the sake of simplicity, but they were more than that, though. Songs like “My Moves Are White (White Hot, That Is),” and “Pleasure Ryland” are very electronic-oriented, but songs like “Smile For The Paparazzi,” “Guilty Pleasure,” and “The City Is At War” have a harder-edged, guitar-driven sound to them, so they’re very hard to get a grasp on. I really like that, though, because every song has its own sound to it. Every song on this LP is very, very memorable, catchy, and unique. Its sound is probably my favorite part, because of how interesting, unique, and awesome it is. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard an album like this, whether it was ten years ago or today.

Saporta is also a very good aspect of this album, because he’s one hell of a frontman. He’s not amazing, per se, because he’s no Patrick Stump. His voice isn’t that good, but it’s still very good, nonetheless. He pulls off the hooks quite nicely, and his voice is very versatile, especially on how diverse the album’s sound is. Saporta’s just not the songbird of our generation, or anything close to that, but his voice is still good. I enjoyed it back then, and I still enjoy it now. He’s got a lot of charisma, range, and power to his voice that I enjoy greatly, but I wouldn’t call him one of my favorite vocalists. I also wouldn’t call him one of my favorite lyricists, because this LP’s lyrics are the one aspect of this album that I’m very mixed on. I don’t know how I feel about the lyrics on this album, because they range from being very clever, well-written, and funny to being awkward, weird, and awful. From what I’ve read, Saporta started Cobra Starship to let loose a bit, as well as approach music from a more joking perspective. The lyrics on their records aren’t meant to be taken too seriously, and that’s totally fine, because I don’t take anything on these albums seriously. Well, there are a couple of songs with more “serious” lyrics, and go figure, they’re probably the best. “The World Has Its Shine (But I Would Drop It On A Dime)” and “One Day Robots Will Cry” are the two songs on this album with a more “serious” set of lyrics, and they’re written very, very well, so I’m kind of shocked that more songs aren’t in a serious vein. The funny thing about these songs, though, is that they don’t distract from the joking and humorous tone of the rest of the album. I think it’s that the sound of the songs are what you’d expect from the rest of the album, ultimately sounding like they’d still fit on the album.

The humorous lyrics definitely range from quite funny to quite awful. Songs like “My Moves Are White (White Hot, That Is),” “The City Is At War,” “Kiss My Sass,” which features Travie McCoy, actually, and “Pleasure Ryland,” just to name a few, are the songs that have funnier, sillier, and more enjoyable lyrics, but this LP gets really weird, awkward, and just plain bad a few times. The one song that I don’t like, at least in terms of its lyrics, are “Damn You Look Good And I’m Drunk (Scandalous).” The song itself isn’t bad, and it’s got a solid hook, but the lyrics are atrocious. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, but the song is about how someone is sexually attractive when the narrator is drunk, and how that person is so trashy, he wouldn’t take them home to his mother unless she were dead. Yikes, talk about a bad and unfunny lyric, but it gets worse. Some random rappers show up to deliver an incredibly unpleasant and terrible verse about how this woman is very unattractive, nasty, and possibly a man. It’s an awfully transphobic and disgusting lyric. Even 13-year-old me thought that lyric was really gross, but I wasn’t sure why. I sure as hell didn’t think it was funny. There’s also another song about prostitution, and how it’s absolutely amazing. That one’s not offensive, it’s just super awkward, because I can’t say that I’ve ever heard another song that has a song about that, but whatever. The lyrics are very much a mixed bag, but the album itself is great. If you can get past the lyrics, and I could understand if you can’t, you’ll find a diverse, unique, and interesting pop-rock / dance-pop album to get into. The songs are catchy, fun, and energetic, as well as diverse as all hell, and Gabe Saporta is good vocalist that works well with the sound that he’s trying to create. I think he pulls it off well, and the album holds up relatively well ten years later. It’s definitely not the most underrated album of 2007, but it’s a bit underrated, nonetheless, especially because they got a lot worse on their next couple of albums, ultimately disappearing before breaking up.

#cobra starship #viva la cobra #gabe saporta #midtown #pop #rock #pop-punk #electro-rock #electronic #travie mccoy #patrick stump #fueled by ramen

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