Job for a Cowboy - Demonocracy

If you want a more detailed version of Job for a Cowboy’s history, read the reviews I wrote on their first two albums. Here’s the short version: Job for a Cowboy released Doom [EP] in 2005. The album can only be described as generic deathcore and (for some reason still) Job for a Cowboy’s most famous and bestselling release to date. After withstanding constant harassment and put-downs from millions of metalheads and metal bands, Job for a Cowboy couldn’t take it anymore and have since then released two mediocre death metal albums. Neither of them are horrible in any way other than that their guitarists and bassist sucked, they’re just completely void of any attention-grabbing qualities. Then comes Demonocracy, which thanks to their reputation, I didn’t really bother listening to until last week.

The first track opens up and wait……what the hell was that? This is the first time I have ever been surprised by Job for a Cowboy! Simply because of that intro where the guitars and bass simultaneously move up and down in pitch to then release an explosion of technical chaos, I knew that these guys have finally tightened all loose ends and created something legit. Although they have made millions of HUGE improvements, they do have one problem that bothers me; probably just because I’m a reviewer and a music nerd, I don’t know.

Job for a Cowboy doesn’t really have a signature sound that I can hear. The reason why is because they keep making so many drastic changes in style that there isn’t really much of a thing that they’re known for. The one thing that I guess they’ve always had in their music is in the vocals. The vocalist isn’t one of the BEST growlers, but he sure has a talent for being really fast and laying down his growls in really odd (but cool) rhythmic patterns. Other than that, everything about their music seems to change with every album. They did keep a fairly consistent sound with their first two full-lengths though. But by the time a band releases their third album, they need to have a solidified unique characteristic that can only be found in Job for a Cowboy’s music to use as a blueprint for future records.

But other than that annoying fact, Demonocracy needs to be in the collection of ALL death metal fans. There isn’t much that I have to say about the guitar distortion other than that it’s not overpowering and it’s not overpowered. I can hear the bass A LOT better than ever before, which is probably because they replaced that dude with the huge gauges with a real bassist. Once they had someone that could actually play bass, they turned it up.

The drums are tuned a certain way so that they sound extremely technical. I know that their drummer isn’t good enough to be as technical as he sounds (although he’s improved a fuckton since Ruination, especially with speed), but he electrifies the music by shooting energy through every frequency of the sound with his pummeling speed.

Now that I’ve listened to this album a couple of times, I’m starting have a problem that I’ve had with every other Job for a Cowboy album; monotony. What I mean by that is that all the songs sound the same. Yes, I know that people who aren’t very familiar with death metal say the same thing about Grave, Deicide, Malevolent Creation, and Immolation, but seriously, the only way I can tell the difference between all of Job for a Cowboy’s songs is by recognizing certain opening riffs or “awesome moments” like in Summon the Hounds (the intro) and Constitutional Masturbation (“I….MASTURBATE!!”). Yes, this is less true in Demonocracy, but seriously, they’re not even TRYING to make every song unique! I can’t tell the difference between ANY of the tracks, other than knowing that some of them have epic guitar solos (I might have forgotten to mention that before).

Demonocracy is by far Job for a Cowboy’s best album and deserves a 16/20 for being a technical death highlight of 2012. Currently the only tech death record the band has released, Demonocracy stands alone in the tech death section of my music library, awaiting (hopefully) another Job for a Cowboy album like it. I would highly recommend picking this up, and also catching their set on this year’s Summer Slaughter Tour which features Cannibal Corpse, Between the Buried and Me, Exhumed, Cerebral Bore, The Faceless, and many more.