JOB FOR A COWBOY – MOON HEALER

(Moon Healer is out on 23 February on Metal Blade Records)

2024 looks set to be an interesting year for comebacks, and few of those, I’d imagine, will attract as much interest – or generate as much divisive discussion – as the long-awaited new album from resurrected Death Metal revenants Job For A Cowboy.

That’s right, I said “Death Metal” rather than “Deathcore”, because it’s high time we all acknowledged that, whether you like them or not (and I’m sure there are many who don’t) the band haven’t been “Deathcore” since the release of Genesis way back in 2007.

Not only that, but in the years preceding their hiatus – culminating in the challenging technicality and churning intensity of the career-defining Sun Eater – it became clear that the band were more interested in pushing their sound in an increasingly unorthodox and unpredictable direction, rather than giving in to any outside pressures to conform to anyone else’s ideas of who they should be.

And although it’s now been almost (but not quite) a full decade since they last saddled up, there’s no question that on Moon Healer these cowboys have continued to ride even further down the proggy path laid out by its predecessor.

It’s a ballsy move, that’s for sure, to follow-up your most creatively complex, and arguably most popular, work with something even less accessible and even more demanding… but that’s exactly what Job For A Cowboy have done here.

That’s not to say that Moon Healer doesn’t have hooks – the moody mid-section of “Grinding Wheels of Ophanim” has been stuck in my brain ever since I heard it, for example, and the lethally infectious lead melodies laced throughout tracks like “Etched in Oblivion” and “Into the Crystalline Crypts” are as attention-grabbing as they are eye-opening – it’s just that they’re more concerned with being “compelling” rather than “catchy”, in the sense that although you might not find them immediately hummable on first listen you’re going to feel compelled to keep on coming back to them more and more as time goes by.

It’s a good thing too, as Moon Healer isn’t the sort of album you can easily digest in just one sitting, and it’s likely that a fair proportion of the band’s potential listeners may find themselves put off by the record’s subtly psychogenic, stream-of-consciousness style which – as swiftly becomes apparent during shape-shifting opener “Beyond the Chemical Doorway” – largely eschews standard song-structures and traditionalist tropes in favour of an altogether more free-flowing and organic approach which befits its strange subject matter.

Thankfully the band’s collective chemistry is still as strong as ever, despite the passage of the years (and the addition of a new, albeit temporary, drummer behind the kit in the shape of ultra-talented, ex-Animosity, current Entheos, sticksman Navene Koperweis) and the intricate interplay between the propulsive, punchy riffage of Al Glassman and Tony Sannicandro and the convulsive, funky bass-lines of Nick Schendzielos on songs such as the massive “The Sun Gave Me Ashes…” and punishing penultimate track “The Agony Seeping Storm” remains a consistent highlight throughout the album.

And then, of course, there’s frontman Jonny Davy, whose blistering – and instantly recognisable – barrage of phlegmatic snarls and bile-gargling growls tells an interlocking, ever-evolving story of existential angst and hallucinatory horror all culminating in a climactic shriek of “My body had been purged, bathed by the sound of flies” during the dizzying denouement of outlandish album closer “The Forever Rot”.

All of this, ultimately, adds up to what may well be the band’s most challenging, and most rewarding, work of their entire, almost twenty year, career, proving once and for all that being rejected by the rest of the herd doesn’t always have to be a death sentence… sometimes it simply sets you free to walk your own path.