Album Reviews : Job For A Cowboy – Sun Eater

Bands need to stop putting their weakest song first. Cannibal Corpse just did it, Meshuaggah always do it, and now Job For A Cowboy fucked my morning well and truly by convincing me that their new album was going to sound like the heavy metal-version of nursing home bingo. I really like the rest of the songs so I won’t dwell on it, but for Christ’s sake guys, it’s not like we’ll not notice it or forget about it by the end of the record. Just don’t include it, and then I can have a less disappointing time. Please, think of Mitch next time you structure an album, it’s all I ask.

I haven’t kept up with JFAC (whose acronym looks like a type of media player) since I was a wee teen, deathcoring and crab moshing my way through PCYC gigs. It was a slightly startling realization that this whole “deathcore” phenomenon kicked off when I was still in high school, and on Myspace, and most definitely by a band with the silliest name since Celine Dion. But now, x amount of years later, here we are, with nary a breakdown or pig squeal in sight.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the smooth jazz-death metal on Sun Eater. The whole thing sounds like John Mayer found Mayhem, right down to the really pleasant progressions and resolutions, laid back guitar solos, and old folks easy listening production, which particularly stood out for me. In another recent review, I mentioned the flaccid mix that can ruin my enjoyment of a metal album, the one when a band really wants to make sure everyone can hear the bass guitarist and all the cool shit he’s doing. JFAC fall right down into that hole, and while it sounds much better on a home stereo or studio cans, I’m not fucking lugging them onto the 07:05 to Flinders Street Station, not after last time. The bass playing is impressive, but it’s at the sake of the rest of the album getting the punch I like. I’m sure there will be plenty of people keen to study the musicality of it all, but I wants me metal fuckin’ tough and violent, aye. I don’t really. I’d just like the guitars to have more impact.

I guess I like all the songs on here, I just can’t help but feel like I don’t know what I’m grasping on to. They don’t sound like anyone. There’s obvious influences, from Nile to Between The Buried And Me, but there’s no defining thing that makes me go “ah, this is a Job For A Cowboy song.”Combined with the relaxing production, listening all the way through was like transcendental meditation for metalheads; you let the riffs arise in your sphere of consciousness, pass through you, and drift away, never letting your ego grasp to a particular form or movement. Which is nice, I suppose, but not really what I’m after. What I’m getting at is that we need to bring back crabcore

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Band: Job For A Cowboy
Album: Sun Eater
Year: 2014
Genre: Death Metal
Label: Metal Blade
Origin: Arizona, USA

Tracklist:

1. Eating The Visions Of God
2. Sun Of Nihility
3. The Stone Cross
4. The Synthetic ea
5. A Global Shift
6. The Celestial Antidote
7. Encircled By Mirrors
8. Buried Monuments
9. Worming Nightfall

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