Review: Job for a Cowboy Continue To Build Their Legacy with Moon Healer

It’s been fascinating to watch the continual evolution that Job for a Cowboy have undergone since they first exploded onto the scene with the infamous Doom EP just shy of 20 years ago. Back then they were just a bunch of fresh faced youngsters cutting their teeth in the deathcore scene, and doing a damn good job of it too. But at the same time, beneath the surface there always seemed to be a yearning for something… more. More heavy. More technical. More hard-hitting. More, more, more.

As time went on the band continued to both find and redefine themselves, with each subsequent release becoming more and more refined as they built upon everything they’d learned and accomplished with the previous one. This constant growth eventually culminated with the release of the phenomenal 2014 album Sun Eater, which saw their wildest defiance of expectations yet. It was far more progressive and technical than anything the band had put out before, but still grounded enough to retain that unmistakable JFAC flavor. It was bold. It was ambitious. It was a statement.

But then, as it is often wont to do, life ended up getting in the way, and the decision was made to take a step back during the zenith of their career in order to focus on various personal affairs (and of course the pandemic didn’t help matters either). No one could fault them for this, but as the fans begrudgingly moved on to other things, many could not help but wonder when, or even if, Job for a Cowboy would ever make a comeback, and what it would look like if they did.

Well, my friends, a decade later, that time has finally come. They’re back. The question is, was it worth the wait? Does Moon Healer indeed live up to a level of hype that is ten years in the making?

You bet your ass it does.

After listening to it from front to back at least a dozen times, as well as paying a referential revisit to its predecessor, it’s safe to say that this is the logical next step in the progression of Job for a Cowboy’s sound. It’s not as far of a leap forward as Sun Eater was, but a big step was taken nonetheless.

The most noticeable difference this time around is in the complexity of the drums. JFAC have always had talented drummers, but Navene Koperweis is in a league of his own, and his influence on this album is, in a word, monumental. The man is positively surgical with his feet and his cymbal work, always finding creative ways to add just the right amount of flourish without overshadowing anyone else, and also having the situational awareness to know exactly when to sit back and let someone else take the reins. Having already collaborated with Jonny Davy on the stellar Fleshwrought album Dementia / Dyslexia back in 2010, it’s no surprise that Koperweis already had something of a latent chemistry with the band that was just waiting to burst out, and burst it did, in glorious fashion.

As for the rest of the music, yes, it pretty much is just the sequel to Sun Eater, but that’s not a bad thing by any means. It’s technical, with hints of Cynic and creepy chord progressions a la Blotted Science occasionally peeking through in songs like “The Sun Gave Me Ashes So I Sought Out the Moon” and “Into the Crystalline Crypts”, but never to the point of inaccessibility. There is no point on this album where you can’t still bob your head along with the music and vibe with everything that’s going on, even at its most jazzy and off-kilter moments. I would know, I tried to find an example and I couldn’t. It really is that well written.

And oh BABY, that bass. I’ll never get tired of listening to Nick Schendzielos slap and pop his way through a track with ease, especially on funky breaks like the one at the end of “Etched in Oblivion”. We need more funk-inspired bass in metal, period. There’s some, and it’s good, but it ain’t enough.

It’s an extremely delicate balancing act to have just the right amount of technicality while still remaining cohesive and interesting. On the one hand you obviously want to push boundaries and not bore your audience with the same thing they’ve already heard ad nauseum, but on the other hand it’s also very easy to get ahead of yourself and write something that, while technically impressive, is ultimately soulless and sterile. It might be hard to play, and it might impress some music theory nerds, but at the end of the day it still won’t have the kind of staying power that you’d hoped for. Moon Healer not only walks this line, but struts across it with practiced confidence and swagger.

This next part is a minor detail, but it helps give the music that extra little push it needs to be all the more memorable, and that is the lyrical patterns. We’ve all known that Jonny Davy is a powerful vocalist since the beginning, but he also has a knack for understanding exactly how everything will sound as a whole, and as such it’s not necessarily the lyrics themselves that impress me but the placement of them. I’ve often explained to non-metalheads that the best way to get over the obnoxiousness of the vocals is to think of them as another instrument, specifically a percussion instrument with extended attack and decay. When you view them from that perspective, you really start to gain an appreciation for how essential the vocal patterns are to a band’s catchiness. Other bands like Aborted, The Black Dahlia Murder, Soreption, and Spawn of Possession understand this concept and execute it very well (past tense in SoP’s case, sadly), but nobody else does it quite like Jonny.

Simply put, Moon Healer is one of the best, most perfectly balanced technical death metal albums I’ve ever heard, an instant classic all but guaranteed to stay in regular rotation for quite some time. Even after listening to it exhaustively and going over it with a fine toothed comb, I still find myself wanting to go back and listen to it again just for shits and giggles. It’s not just technical, it’s fun. It’s a blast to listen to, possibly the only tech death album I’ve ever legitimately caught myself dancing along to. Other people who saw me were instantly curious what I was listening to, and all I could tell them was “Wait until you get a load of this shit.”

Here’s hoping that this isn’t just a proverbial flash in the pan and that JFAC are back on the circuit for good, because this album has the potential to generate a staggering amount of momentum. I’m sure we’ll see them back on the road to promote it in due time, and I’m very interested to see how this material sounds in a live setting with its copious amounts of nuance, but in the meantime, at least we finally got some truly killer new tunes to sate our collective appetite. Hopefully we won’t have to wait another ten years until the next album, but in the meantime, this one will do juuuust fine.

Job For A Cowboy’s Moon Healer drops on Friday, February 23 via Metal Blade Records. Preorder your copy today.