Cows
Daddy Has A Tail!

The Cows are the boyfriends you would never want for your daughters, the banks you would never trust with your savings, the friends you would never lend your car to, the babysitters who, I hope for your sake, will never watch over your children, the skydiving instructors you'd never let pack your gear.

On the other hand, it's certain that in a bar, at a disco, at a barbecue by the river, at a rave, at a concert, on vacation at the beach, the lake, or in the mountains, they would make your experiences wildly unforgettable.

Why? Why?!?! Well, it's simple... because they are crazy, insane, irresponsible, uncontrollable, and unpredictable.

"Daddy Has A Tail" proves it, clear as a pint of beer deliberately spilled on your heads.

This second release, dated 1989, debut under the legendary Amphetamine Reptile label and following the equally explosive 'Taint Pluribus 'Taint Unum, is pure sonic vandalism, music played to break bourgeois rules and conventions into four, anti-social invectives aimed at mocking and ridiculing themselves and others, no one excluded.

The Cows invite you to line up, bend over, and receive your well-deserved kick in the butt, just for fun, but in their own way.

The fact is, you can't even get mad at them, how can you hold a grudge against people who make you shake in visceral and wild mosh pits with songs like "Camouflage Monkey", in screaming downhill rushes like the fantastic "Bum In The Alley" (a masterpiece jumping from hellish blues-rock to a furious hardcore brawl without interruption), in disastrous harmonic derailments like "Miss Her Beer".

And then, deep down, they are softies, very, very deep down, just listen to the "ballad" hidden beneath "Chasin' Darla" or the album's pinnacle (right at the end of the record), that "Sticky And Sweet" which is their amorous redemption, swaying between sweet heart's confessions and animalistic pulsations of the penis in a perpetual psycho-confusional state, sticky and lascivious.

From the depths of their incompetence, Shannon Shalberg (voice), Thor Eisentrager (guitar or what's left of it), Kevin Rutmanis (bass), and Norm Rogers (drums) elevate the level of rawness and ferocity in the rock scene, devastating it after having shaken it with an approach that, by comparison, would make a Neanderthal appear more like a 17th-century English noble.

One should not be allowed to speak of technique with these Minneapolis cowboys; it would be offensive. However, one can claim that Shelberg and company had a mission, and even if they embodied unreliability in rock band form, they fully accomplished it.

They took the nihilistic verb uttered by hardcore and compressed and amplified it beyond measure, grasped the psychotic hilarity of the Butthole Surfers and did even more with it, carried the dirtiest noise-rock across the last two decades of the millennium with renewed strength and theatrical determination using only a possessed and roaring bass, a boastful and cavernous drum, a rotten and abrasive guitar, and a vulgar and irreverent voice.... and finally they raised the middle finger at us with the warm wish that we all go screw ourselves.

Uh!uh!uh!

Degenerates!