Job For A Cowboy

I've got a mate who slags me off for reading music magazines. Well, I guess he doesn't/didn't slag me off, but was just slagging off magazines in general for being a waste of time and money. He's wrong, of course, and I put him right with a quite vicious tirade of abuse at the time. I shan't be doing that again in a hurry, but I know he reads this and I'm going to point out that Job For A Cowboy were chosen based on reading their name in the issue of Terrrorizer I bought this morning.

Not actually an article about this lot, they were just mentioned in passing in a piece about Diskreet. The reason they caught my eye was because it said they were "pig-squeal hypesters". Certainly sounded like a band for me, innit.

As it goes the first song I heard had no squealing in it. Not that it was rubbish, in fact all 4 songs on their myspace profile are great, but the song that came on first was most un-porcine. Definitely a bunch of squealage going on in the others though. Great stuff. I'm really liking this. Reminds me of a whole slew of other stuff but not in a "oh, same old crap again" way... but that could be because I've never held much truck with originality for the sake of it. If you can take a style and write a shitload of decent riffs and vocals and stuff in that style, go for it. The problem with, say, Trivium, isn't so much that they sound like an amalgam of Metallica and Sacred Reich and Pantera and a load of other bands -- those bands were all great -- the problem with Trivium is that their drummer's fucking shit.

Job For A Cowboy are touring Europe, including a few gigs in England, in -- shock horror! -- March. If the other bands (Unearth/Despised Icon/Daath) are half decent I reckon I'll head along to that.

• myspace.com/jobforacowboy
• jfacmetal.com
• metalblade.com -- their record label