REVIEW: Job for a Cowboy

Artist: Job for a Cowboy

Album: Ruination

Release Date: July 7, 2009

Genre(s): Deathcore, death metal

Holy shit - that's a fucking BADASS album art. You're browsing the metal section in your local music retailer, looking for a new cd to bang your head to. After seeing that display of awesomeness, you're ready to drop your hard earned cash, take it home, and play the shit out of it. With artwork like that, you've got a death metal masterpiece in your hands for sure. Right?

...Right? Sadly, no. You couldn't have been more wrong. The moment Ruination enters the disc tray, starts spinning, and the speakers start lamentably vomiting out the first song, you realize you've made a grave mistake. And it's too late. The sadistic members of the band must be laughing now, knowing you're in for a sad forty minutes of suffering and pain. Not the good kind of pain, like the smash-you-in-the-face brutality of a Cannibal Corpse album. The pain that makes you want to stop living; the kind of pain that can come only from mistakenly purchasing a horrible album. You've just been introduced to Job for a Cowboy.

You can tell right away that the relationship between you two isn't going to work out, and you wish you'd never met. You want to like Job for a Cowboy; you may see the good in them deep down, their sweeeet death metal core, but it's hard to get past all of their glaring flaws. For starters, you can't communicate with each other properly. Why? Maybe because the voice gets on your nerves. The vocalist's growl is deep and sounds pretty good, but all of a sudden, he'll switch up his style (mid-verse, no less) without cause or warning, and do this high shriek that makes him sound like a complete ass. You wouldn't mind this one little issue if he did it less, but it keeps happening, and you don't know how to live with it.

As time goes on, you start neglecting Job for a Cowboy, spending less time with them. You feel bad, but it's just something you can't bring yourself to do. This band bores the hell out of you. Their riffs are generic far beyond interest. Once in a while it strikes up something that really interests you, but that cool part of that song is over before you know it, and it's back to that driving monotony you've gotten used to. You dread the premise of giving Ruinaton another go-around, knowing full well that it's going to drag on and on and on and on and on and on miserably. When you think one of these songs is going to end, your spirits lift at the prospect of getting to hear something different (if only slightly), and then come crashing down when the song continues. Never before have you wanted something to end so badly.

Relationships require a sense of rhythm from both participants, and the rhythm in Job for a Cowboy's latest album can only be described as erratic. You can only help but feel sorry for the drummer, witnessing that he has such talent yet no idea what to do with it. He overuses the cymbals in every song, including parts where it seems entirely inappropriate. The drum part changes at least 6 times per passage; there's no consistency whatsoever. It's hard for you to get into the songs when the drum parts sound like a bunch of randomly hit difficult patterns that the this guy played, clearly while attempting to show off, looped throughout the song, without even an effort to sync them with the other instruments. When you realize that the driving force behind everything doesn't even make sense to you, then you realize that it's time to break up.

And that's it - your relationship with Job for a Cowboy, which seemed so sincere at first, has come to a swift end. You can't say you hated everything about Ruination, though. There's a memorable solo here or there, and it's decidedly less deathcore-sounding than the band's previous work. You may be able to give them credit for that, but it's certainly not enough to make Ruination worth a listen. Any group with a couple good guitarists and a resilient drummer can get together, play something heavy, and call it death metal, but that doesn't mean it's going to be good. Coherent songwriting and expression are musts, and JFAC fails so miserably in that category, they're not even worth calling a band.

Ruination hasn't touched your cd player for weeks, and it's found a new home inside your recepticle bin, but the memories of the bad times you spent with it will haunt you forever.

Track to Check: God help you if you even think about listening to this album, but each song is as mindless and putrid as the other.
Score: 2.6/10

-Psychotic Pulse