Big, fat, fuzzy bass sitting squarely at the center of the universe, with everything else orbiting in its wah-wah pedal gravity. There are no guitar solos - - because there's no guitar. Year of the Cobra are a Doom Metal duo featuring only drums, bass, and vocals. The songs are necessarily simple, but the sound is never thin. Quite the opposite, in fact; the bass expands far and wide in every direction. The riffs are big enough to see and hear from space. The music is the primordial lava that spews from Mount Doom.

Jack White is to The White Stripes” as Amy Tung is to the Year of the Cobra duo; she holds down the lead bass and lead vox. In her hands, the 4-strings evoke Cliff Burton (Metallica), D.D. Verni (Overkill), Dan Lilker (various projects), Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath), Dug Pinnick (King's X), Krist Novoselic (Nirvana), and Mark Sandman (Morphine). She doesn’t dazzle you with Billy Sheehan fingertapping pyrotechnics or Flea funk slap dexterity; just workman-like command of the lead and the pocket.
If her bass playing doesn’t get you, her vocals surely will. She occasionally kicks into a killer snarl, but for the most part, what’s amazing about YotC is the yin-yang contrast between the gray-black Doomy sludge of the bottom end and the shining, airy light of her gently powerful voice. As a singer, she’s a little bit Anneke Von Giersbergen (various), Meliora Creagher (Rasputina), Pat Benatar, Cortney Tidwell, Morgan Lander (Kittie), and Yuki Chikudate (Asobi Seksu).
At the intro to track 1, “The Battle of White Mountain,” I was ready to sing the lyrics to S.O.D.’s “Milk,” but then Tung’s sweet vocals breezed in, and the complexion of the song changed entirely. Stand tracks are “Into the Fray” and “At the Edge.”