Do this: find a construction site and stand about six feet away from the guy manning the jackhammer. Stand with your legs about hip distance apart for balance, ball up both of your hands into fists and proceed to punch yourself in the face repeatedly until your arms are useless and your face is one cohesive throb of pain. Take a breather, then repeat this scenario for about 35 minutes.

Or you could just listen to Black Cobra’s Bestial instead. Same difference, really.

The sound that Black Cobra has conjured up here is deep. Very deep. Bottomless pit deep. Demons bellowing from the bowels of hell deep. Barry White in the throes of orgasm deep. That this subterranean ugliness is courtesy of two former members of defunct sludge merchants Cavity and 16 should come as no surprise; the racket that these two have concocted is one big, huge, festering sore of low-end abuse that swallows you whole, moves you though its digestive tract and deposits you from the other end, confused and violated... yet oddly invigorated.

Imagine the unhinged malevolence of Today Is the Day excised of any and all high end, or Big Business devoid of hooks and warmth, leaving only rolling pummel and blown out, bottom-heavy bludgeon. The guitar tone on Bestial is so down tuned you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a bass – and the discovery that it is in fact guitar will have you wondering how the strings were kept taut enough to squeeze out a single note of sustain.

Fuzz is ubiquitous, cloaked over fast, spiteful tracks that have all the delicacy of a bandsaw chewing through rotted wood – swirling and chaotic, a hailstorm of insect buzz flitting around you in search of blood, sweat and / or any other secretion your body might offer up. When the tempos decelerate to Paleolithic crawls, the results are the same, only in slow motion: leaden, sluggish trawls through denuded landscapes that house only bubbling tar pits that pop and spit, threatening to consume anything that orbits within their grasp.

Hardcore fast or slower than slow doom, the results are always the same: an enveloping bear hug, crushing, inexorable, forcing thick air that barely filters into your lungs out in one last gasp as you move towards a beaten-down stupor. (7.5/10)