HYLI Vol. LXXIX - Crime in Stereo and Job for a Cowboy
Two bands that haven't released music in close to a decade announced new stuff in the last week, here are two of their albums.
No normal intro this week, I don’t got shit to blab about (Andy: this is a normal intro). Charleston was fun, my wife and I ate some great food and drank some great drinks and watched some movies. End of story. On August 28th, the death metal band Job for a Cowboy released a new song off an upcoming fifth album with no real details yet. It’ll, presumably, come out this year or next and be their first in nine or ten years since 2014’s Sun Eater. The following day, August 29th if you cannot math, the “melodic hardcore”/punk band Crime in Stereo announced their fifth record and first since 2010, House & Trance, and released a few songs. Andy had never heard of CiS and I had never listened to JFAC, so it seemed to make perfect synergistic sense to spend some time with these two bands who haven’t been around since pretty much the time Andy and I met. Dig it.
Crime in Stereo - Is Dead
Patrick: Look, I’m not going to talk about That Other Band from Levittown, NY that made kinda-post-hardcore/kinda-emo/kinda-whatthefuckever music from the 2000s-2010s (Andy: who?). It isn’t worth it for me to dig into that bullshit on the worldwide web. I will just leave it at this: there are a lot of bands I would have never checked out if not for Brand New (Andy: oh), so I’m glad that, if literally nothing else, they led me to this album and band.
Crime in Stereo is Dead is perfect music to me when it is good and simply there when it is not. Luckily, it is way more good than it is bad. “XXXX (The First Thousand Years of Solitude)” (Andy: metal as shit name) just has such insanely cool sounding guitars. I think I first heard this album in 2012 or so, a few years after it came out, and the way the guitars sound about 20 seconds into the track and album just blew my little 23-year-old brain. I hadn’t heard shit like that. There was a little bit there where the production of Mike Sapone was like following a director of movies you like where you’ll check out anything they work on for a short period of time. Dude just made rock music sound the exact way I wanted it to sound. Haven’t the slightest what he is up to now but 20-year-old me was buying all the Sapone stock I could. The way the blown-out guitar part just rips through the speakers midway through “Unfortunate Tourists?” Come the fuck on!
Kristian Hallbert is a great vocalist. “…but you are vast” has that perfect kind of Long Island punk vocal thing going. When the double-time tempo change comes after about a minute or so, I just buy in so entirely to the song. Super melodic vocal hooks with batshit insane guitar riffs. Bass too. I love the way the distorted bass part kicks in halfway through “Small Skeletal” in the second verse and plays off the vocal line. I’m ALL IN on that shit, brother. Love the little hushed whisper vocal part on “Vicious Teeth” before the chorus too. A+ (Andy: whispers are cool, we’ve established this).
I probably haven’t heard this record or thought of this band in, conservatively, half a decade but, man, this record was so important to me for about five seconds. The new song is cool. I think I’m a bit more interested in what this band sounds like as middle-aged men having taken a decade to cool off than I would have been if they continually released music for the last 13 years. Sometimes you just gotta take a breather, as I did with this record (Andy: how do I take a breather just from like….life) (Patrick: ?). I liked it way more than I expected, coming back to it after some time. Hope you like it too.
Andy: This is some good shit man. This is like if Taking Back Sunday was good at what they did and made more complex music (Patrick: bingo). Yeah, TBS can catch some strays. I don’t care. If I had listened to it when it dropped in 2007 I would have been all-in on this album. Instead, I was trudging through the wasteland of myspace metalcore and deathcore and writing about albums that nobody gave a shit about except me and a few internet friends (shoutout to my boys, you know who you are).
“Unfortunate Tourists” is a certified banger. This shit goes hard. Slow mellow part about midway through that breaks into just an angry guitar near the end. Absolute blast. Even the mandatory slow song, “Orbiter,” goes off (Patrick: maybe the best track here). “Small Skeletal” is so good man. It makes me want to dance? I hate dancing but this makes me want to dance like a goofball? I’m honestly pretty annoyed I’m hearing this for the first time at 33 cause this is a lock for 17-year-old Andy to love.
I know Patrick always says this but the electric guitar is just the best. Why have a normal-sounding guitar when you can sound like this? Who knows. I’ll never understand the reason people are out here with an acoustic guitar or a nice soft little tone or whatever when you can do this shit on it. An insult to the instrument not to make it hum like this all the time. Glad Crime In Stereo likes and respects the instrument.
11 Songs at 35 minutes. Efficient and to the point. Lock this in as a Top 5 recommendation on this newsletter for me (Patrick: wow!!). Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic this week so it works. Maybe I’ve decided to have fun. Who knows. Great record. I Loved it.
Andy: Job For A Cowboy’s 2005 Doom EP helped usher in the first wave of the Myspace-era deathcore that I obsessively consumed in my late teens. Doom is the only time they really dabbled in the deathcore genre, but man, did they leave an impact. I still listen to Doom relatively frequently. While it's very good, it isn’t of the same quality as their later progressive death metal efforts, most notably 2014’s Sun Eater.
Sun Eater stands as one of the finest progressive death metal albums of the past decade. For those who weren't part of the scene when it was released, it's hard to encapsulate how surprising it was for them to produce something of this caliber. They were a deathcore band that made some decent progressive death metal and then they casually dropped an all-timer of an album. It went so far above and beyond what they had previously done - it doesn’t really make sense. This was the final shelling of their omnipresent deathcore cloud and cementing them as genuinely excellent progressive death metal artists. They're heavier than The Faceless and Fallujah but match them in riffs.
The riffs here are so good. The solos here are so good. The bass stands out in the mix which is always fun. Honestly, it boasts one of the best bass tones in the genre. Jonny Davy is a truly outstanding vocalist too. This is arguably a pinnacle in JFAC’s history. His deep tones are spine-chilling — it sounds like he's swallowing his tongue, and I mean that in the best way (Patrick: is there a good way to mean this?). Lyrics, again, while they don’t matter, are fun here. “Sun of Nihility” is the best song in their entire discography, but “Eating the Visions of God” and “Buried Monuments” give it a run. Job for a Cowboy has always been known for its epic closers and “Worming Nightfall” is no exception.
I’d be very interested to hear what the guys have planned for the new album but I’m not sure anything can live up to the surprise that was Sun Eater. Grade A Progressive Death Metal. Hope You Like It.
Patrick: Brother, this artwork is TERRIBLE lmao. What are we doing here. Just real AI Create Metal Artwork shit from nine whole years ago. Andy likes to pretend artwork matters and yet he sends me this shit (Andy: this looks like any one of 10,000 death metal albums grow up).
Guess what? Art doesn’t matter at all (Andy: it does) because this art fucking sucks but this album fucking ROCKS. I had never listened to Job for a Cowboy before because, based on the terrible name, I thought they were on a Buckcherry or Mudvayne-type beat (Andy: how did you possibly come to this conclusion) (Patrick: their name is Job for a Cowboy, man). Way off! Could not be more wrong! Honestly, this record kinda sounds like if Gojira and Mastodon merged their sounds but got way heavier. Who doesn’t want to hear that?
“Buried Monuments” is so cool. Just comes right out of the gate with a barnburner of a riff. I love the electric guitar. I love it when bands also love the electric guitar. Boy howdy do these cowboys seem to love it. Riffs on riffs on riffs on this record. This might be my favorite guitar playing of any HYLI record Andy has sent me (Andy: wtf!).
The vocals are cool too! Dude mixes his death metal vocals and more high-pitched stuff seamlessly in a way that is really cool. “Sun of Nihility” has such a cool vocal tone. You can tell this is a band that refined their approach over the course of a decade and it really pays off here. Andy has shown me their deathcore early stuff in the past and, whether you like that or not, it’s kinda impossible to deny Jonny Davy’s evolution as a vocalist over the course of the band’s history. I will absolutely be checking out their new record whenever it drops and I will absolutely be coming back to Sun Eater again and again. (Andy: it is 2023 and Patrick likes Acacia Strain and Job for a Cowboy. Someone screencap this and send it to 2011 Patrick).