GALACTIC COWBOYS - "LET IT GO" (METAL BLADE)
GALACTIC COWBOYS - "LET IT GO" (METAL BLADE)
What I'd heard of Galactic Cowboys so far was on the right side of silly. Kinda catchy semi-pop rock tunes, always played with a weird thing here or there, and good musicianship throughout.
Let's get it right off my chest: With "Let It Go" they really let it go. They have, in fact, gone too far.
It starts with a zany intro, nothing too bad, followed by a collection of 9 classic Galactic Cowboys tracks: Rock with a hint of The Beatles, well done, not too much in the way of being offensive or conspicuous. Nice music, and I mean that in a good way. The silliness is so far contained within short fragments between the songs, which I'll leave for you to discover.
Starting at track 10, however, they seem to have really lost it. It starts with the tribal/rhythmic "Boom!", then followed by jazz, followed by death metal riffing, then the sleepinvokingly superfluous "Ordinary". "Internalize", then, is more or less OK again. "Swimming in December" is a longish tune, almost boring, that transforms into the new-age synth carpet of "Song for Sybo". "Future" and "Bucket of Chicken", bringing us closer to the end, left a pretty good impression again.
I am starting a new paragraph to tell you what I think of the final track, "The Records Ends". This starts off OK, nothing too spectacular but nonetheless OK. After a bit over 3.5 minutes, it suddenly loses all rationality and changes into, excuse my French and for lack of better adjectives, a god-awful fucking rackety noise. A total insult to the listener, leaving a very, very bad final impression of the album as a whole. My father uses to have similar descriptions of horror for the sounds early Venom or Slayer, and each time he uttered them I thought he was getting old, an old git who can only complain. But "The Record Ends" will never, by any standards, be consider an OK track. It's probably the worst load of musical bollocks I've heard this side of the Dada movement. It's pointless, it's stupid, and it's a waste of time.
Which altogether makes for a generally bad review of an album that could have been quite good if only they'd left off the second half. The first 10 tracks only partly make up for it. Art is cool, but I'd rather put on a CD because I like it, not because it's some or other profound artistic statement. I won't play any of the final 8 tracks again, ever (which will hardly have been the Cowboys' intention).
RK
Written June 2000