The name might be misleading, but Job For A Cowboy is far from playing country music. Little remains of the young band of the early 2000s. Only Johnny Davy’s guttural voice provides a link between albums with otherwise changing personnel. With a recent progressive turn and psychedelic themes, the band delivers a new opus that’s complex but breathes. What’s particularly striking is that, for an album of technical death metal, the tempi are not particularly fast. Indeed, the rhythmic guitars crunch with weight and give space to the other instruments. The latter tastily subdivide, whether through compact, charged percussion or virtuoso melodic leads. These ingredients produce an open, dense whole, where the listener is free to their head in spite of the fast-moving strata. The tone is almost atmospheric. In the saturated world of contemporary death metal, Job for A Cowboy have truly reinvented themselves with a fresh vision of what the genre can be. The paradox is that the vocals of the only founding member are perhaps the weakest element of the whole, even if they are what ties us to the band’s origins. Moon Healer is a brilliant complement to the previous album, Sun Eater, released a decade ago. As with that other album, which had already revitalized enthusiasm for the band, the success of Moon Healer suggests that Job for A Cowboy will continue to evolve in this less raw and more meticulously built aesthetic.
