Album Notes

NE PERFORMER (11/2006)

Simply stated, Cober is a one-piece bucket plunge into the depths of Sheila Bommakanti's well of a heart, bled dry by former lovers and the scorn of an unforgiving society. The music on Eulogy, the third album under the Cober name and first to use the one-piece band format from the Seattle native now living in the Boston area, is intimate and deliberate, paced by Bommakanti's double-necked SG and two Marshall half-stacks. But where each delayed guitar part glimmers, the tie that binds is Bommakanti's expressively poetic voice, at once both haunting and inviting, a gentle caress in a darkened room mapped by candlelight. Bommakanti's sort of prodigious musical work is Cober as a whole, as she's responsible for all the sounds emanating from the speakers.

When she's not hypnotic, she's demanding, but as Cober, she never loses her aim. It's a beautifully eerie piece of work, a star of Mazzy-like proportions. It's a soundtrack for the pensive, emotionally delved into after you've returned home from catching your lover in bed with another, or realizing time and age are catching up with your youthful ambitions. Sort past all the rage, sort past the despair, and you find introspection. Cober is the sound of healing, the starting over and the new beginnings. These aren't cityscapes she's traveling through; this journey is inwards.

On opening track "Words," Bommakanti sings "She didn't need you / What makes you think I do?" On "The Verge," she concludes with "I tried to be a lady / But look where that has gotten me." If it weren't for the luminous musical creations she seems to mold from anguish, it'd be easy to feel sorry for her. But in the end, through darkness there is always sound. And through sound, there's often hope. Even in its most pessimistic of hours. -Michael Marotta


"Bommakanti brings Cober to Middle East"
THE PATRIOT LEDGER (August 18, 2005)

Multi-instrumental virtuoso Sheila Bommakanti doesn't seem like a sad person, but the music she makes as Cober (formerly a full band, now just her) is so mind-numbingly gloomy and painfully depressing it makes Radiohead sound like a backyard barbecue soundtrack, perfect for some light volleyball and a few 'dogs.

Her absorbing album, The Breaker, has earned her a reputation in her native Seattle as the "queen of downer rock" (and they'd know).

Make no mistake, however: the stuff is cathartic. If you're in need of a full-on emotional cleansing that's first ethereal and delicate and then loud and skull-splitting, look no further. --CHAD BERNDTSON