On Monday September 16, the long-awaited Job for a Cowboy show hit Adelaide’s Fowler’s Live. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the sound of Job for a Cowboy – as indeed I wasn’t until last Monday – they are a progressive death metal band that hails from Arizona. A young band, they’ve only been around since 2003, and technologies such as MySpace have blasted them into the public sphere, and they have gained an enormous fan base. Much of that fan base is quite young.
The show at Fowler’s was all-ages and featured three support bands: two locals, Red Shore and The Rivalry, and Melburnians Picture the End. As I was running late and as the show started really early, I unfortunately missed Red Shore – sorry fellas.
The first band I did see was Picture the End. I walked in and, maybe it’s my age, and maybe the kiddies who were there weren’t used to metalheads and were scared, but the crowd had kind of lined the walls. In the middle was this enormous gap, in which a couple of absolute wankers were parading up and down, flinging their elbows, knees, legs, and arms wildly about. This action was incredibly antisocial, and meant that people were scared to enter the venue for fear of copping a fist in the mouth.
In the meantime, Picture the End, although not exactly my taste in music, played a hard, energetic set. It is unfortunate that the crowd was the way it was because this band worked their arses off to try and get a reaction from the crowd. People apparently enjoyed the set, but there were no horns, not much moshing, just this weird arm-flinging shite that everyone was watching.
At one stage the guitarist from Picture the End looked frustratedly out at the crowd and mouthed ‘what the f-ck?!’
They played a strong set, had a great stage presence, and were really quite good. Most subgenres that end in ’-core’ aren’t for me, but even so, this band played well.
The Rivalry, being a local band, and evidently quite popular, got a far greater crowd reaction. Their set was fairly short, but incredibly intense. The vocalist had an earring torn and very brutally had blood spattered across his neck, and the crowd went wild for it.
But by far the great band of the night was, as one might expect, the headlining act. Job for a Cowboy took to the stage late and in the night and blasted through their set. Blasted through it so quickly, in fact, that although they were scheduled to finish at 11 pm, by my clock they were through and finished by 10.35. Job for a Cowboy play a fairly generic death metal which, although plugged as ‘progressive’, isn’t particularly.
Job for a Cowboy mostly played material from their latest release, which seemed to go down the best. Some of the tracks from older releases and EPs got barely a reaction.
It was a pretty good night, lots of punters, a great diversity of metalheads. The only unfortunate thing was the sound – the bottom end was quite loud, but leads and solos were a bit lost in the murk. The other unfortunate thing was this elbow-flinging wanker dance. Fellas, if you’re gonna do that, do it where you not going to make an arsehole of yourself. It was really unpleasant. The music is aggressive enough – you don’t need to try and top it.
Overall, this was a good show. Hopefully Job for a Cowboy come back again soon. Given a few more years, this young band will easily develop and refine their sound, and hopefully keep trending towards the more extreme.
