Job For A Cowboy
Ruination
Metal Blade
6 July 2009

by Hugh Platt

There’s a good reason why this review is late. Job For A Cowboy’s latest may have been rumbling on our stereos here at Thrash Hits for a couple of weeks now, but for all the promise offered up on their last album, and the excitement about the crazy mutilated goat-pope all over the cover of this one, Ruination just hasn’t been able to excite or disgust us enough to inspire us to put finger to keyboard.

While Jon Davy’s lyrics feel more focussed than ever, carving up political shitheaps fromthe North Korean situation to US human rights abuses in Iraq, the same can’t be said for his bandmates. Ruination exists in a permanent state of pre-fight bluster, like a lone drunk calling out the entire pub for some fisticuffs while his embarassed mates look and their shoes and sup their pints in silence. With neither Bobby Thompson, or new boy Al Glassman, stepping up to supply the required levels of serious shredwork, Davy’s polemics are left to wobble shakily on unsteady death metal foundations.

The moments when the band undeniably nails it - like the time changes in ‘Constitutional Masturbation’ that resonate with the malicious power of a bulldozer shifting up gears to flatten a herd of pygmy horses – it merely goes to highlight just what the band could be, if only their levels of inspiration could match the stamina of Jon Davy’s lyrical ambitions.

Watch the video for ‘Unfurling A Darkened Gospel’ by Job For A Cowboy

This lack of killer instinct isn’t limited to just the younger players in the field of death metal – when held up against the directionless meandering of Obituary’s latest offering, Ruination almost seem like a state-of-the-art Sat-Nav. But Job For A Cowboy still don’t seem to realise that knowing where you are and where you want to be aren’t the same thing as making the actual journey itself. If JFAC want to make a permanent impact with their next album, they need to stop fucking about with the map, put their foot to the floor, and just fucking drive.

3.5/6

Sounds like: The Black Dahlia Murder, Carcass, the echoes of fading promise
Top tracks: Constituional Masturbation, Butchering The Enlightened, To Detonate And Exterminate

Job For A Cowboy – Ruination tracklisting
Unfurling A Darkened Gospel
Summon The Hounds
Constitutional Masturbation
Regurgitated Disinformation
March To Global Enslavement
Butchering The Enlightened
Lords Of Chaos
Psychological Immorality
To Detonate And Exterminate
Ruination