Job For A Cowboy
Genesis

THE REVIEW

Finding oneself in a difficult situation (if we want to use an understatement...) can be like being repeatedly hit by stones, which are thrown at you with increasing frequency and there's no way to escape, as wherever you go the stones keep falling, as if they were hailstones in the midst of a violent summer storm, and you feel exhausted as well as lost and everything, not only material, inevitably comes to an end.

This is what you experience every time Job For A Cowboy strike with their tracks specifically designed to generate devastation and induce sonic saturation. There is one element that, as things currently stand, still doesn't fully align in the songwriting of the Arizona-based band, which debuts with "Genesis" at full length, and so will have the chance to address this shortcoming: the fact that during the progression of the tracks, the cascade of notes is not always taken to the extreme. Returning to the initial parallelism, one might say that after a while, the hailstorm stops. But if, in a different musical context, this could have been interpreted as a positive factor (in the sense that after tearing you to shreds, they leave you to die bleeding out amidst unspeakable pains...), they simply let go before the situation degenerates and becomes conclusive, perhaps due to the short length of the compositions (the album doesn't go beyond half an hour in total).

Certainly, spewing extreme metal (often brutal death and grind, sometimes crust-core) is formally flawless (the technical/executive skills are evident, not to mention that they worked in the studio with ex-Sabbat Andy Sneap), but they still need to make the sound devastating in depth, since - as things currently stand - they often stop just below the surface. Furthermore, I would advise developing more the ambient/industrial vein showcased in "Upheaval" and "Blasphemy", which here only serve as interludes, and if integrated into the connective tissue of the tracks themselves, could make them even more malicious and interesting (this partly already occurs in "The Divine Falsehood"). The judgment is nevertheless positive and the observations should not be interpreted as elements against them, but as factors for future improvement.

Those who have Relapse sound in their veins will surely appreciate it!