Cows
Taint Pluribus Taint Unum

LA RECENSIONE

They came from Minnesota, but you wouldn't say so. Listening to this crazy debut of theirs (year 1987), they might seem to be from the "school" of the Butthole Surfers. In other words, redneck to the nth degree.

The debut album by Shannon Selberg's Cows is a masterpiece of "Texas-style hardcore." That their headquarters was Minneapolis, the capital of "pop-core," is frankly of little importance. Indeed, it is: it's an aspect that confirms and enhances the iconoclastic character of this reckless formation. While Mould and Westerberg were lamenting their failed relationships, Selberg and his associates were cheerfully calling their mother a whore (the vile, filthy "Mother (I love that bitch)" leaves no room for doubt). Stuff for real punks.
I don't know what Selberg's opinion was regarding Huskers and Mats, but here's a little gem. During an interview with the Cows, the journalist asked, "What is the concept behind your music?" And Selberg replied, "Fuck you, who are you? Another one of those filthy Europeans who needs a "concept" to get up in the morning?" In this pearl of wisdom, the entire sense of the cows-ian operation is encapsulated. The concept behind their music, indeed.

The band's subversive intentions immediately emerge from the abominable one-two punch opener: "Cow Jazz" and "Car Chase" are not "songs," but hallucinatory noise sarabands amidst total chaos, enough to make the Red Crayola (Texans, incidentally...) pale, with all sorts of guitar torture, frenzied drumming, dizzying bass, and a Selberg who, rather than "singing," often just yells like a damned soul in hell or endlessly repeats the track title; all adorned with a horrendously strummed trumpet. These are two tracks that measure the band's sonic intentions.
Even when the song form is somehow recovered, the Cows do not lighten the tone at all. Their typical track is built on penetrating, raucous, cannibalistic bass lines, over which Thor Eisenstrager's guitar indulges in free-form accompaniment, remembering the lesson of no-wave and Paul Leary, amidst the bleakest detunings and dissonances.
Thus are born tracks with a completely disjointed harmonic texture, like "Sieve", progressing through ambushes, jolts, and spasms (aided by particularly versatile as well as powerful drumming), "On Plasma Road" (with the bizarre, squealing riff), "Pictorial" (with a maniacal guitar traversing the entire track like a venomous serpent), and "Yellobelly" (played on more measured cadences, yet all the more perverse for it), with Selberg's hearty laughter rivalling Gibby Haynes… If "Redhouse" and "Tourist" settle the score with the vicious garage-rock of the Stooges, "Summertine Bone" (a parody of Eddie Cochran's famous "Summertime Blues") wins the award for the most absurd cover ever made: the parts that are supposed to be sung are replaced by the revolting scribbles of a deflated trumpet.
The conclusion is entrusted to the lengthy "Weird Kitchen", an elegy in procession time, an apocalyptic lament in which the idea of a music as funny and entertaining as it is secretly "serious" is sublimated, thus ambiguous in the overall effect. Flipper comes to mind, with their sonic garbage capable, however, of expressing the (nihilistic) sense of existence with disarming effectiveness.

The Cows thus fully belong to the crazies who animated the American alternative scene of the 80s. We miss them.