Review JOB FOR A COWBOY ‘Moon Healer’

Job For A Cowboy has been absent from the music scene since the release of their fourth studio album ‘Sun Eater’ in 2014. The band took a break to focus on other important aspects of their lives, but now they have returned to the limelight.

The journey continues with ‘Moon Healer’, following the release of ‘Sun Eater’. The new record features eight sophisticated and intricate death metal songs, showcasing the band’s creativity and aggression. If anything has evolved to a next level compared to its predecessor, it can be said that the songs on ‘Moon Healer’ are even more progressive. This is evident in the brute opener ‘Beyond the Chemical Doorway’. However, the lyrics are not just growled words to the music. Rather, the album takes the listener on a cryptic textual journey with lyrics that allow for an extended scope of interpretation.

At the same time, ‘Sun Eater’ and ‘Moon Healer’ are thematically linked, as their titles suggest. The new album is a sequel, with a fresh perspective for the protagonist instead of losing the ground under his feet through drug use.

Musically, Job For A Cowboy provides the framework for this unconventional journey, and it was ‘The Agony Seeping Storm’ which was released as a first single and appetizer for the alnum a few months ago. The song is exemplary for the entire album, with unconventional riffing, frenzied moments, and nagging vocals as its cornerstones. ‘A Sorrow-Filled Moon’, with its psychedelic beginning, also needs to be mentioned as it is a five-minute fever dream in which complexity and brute force go hand in hand.

‘Moon Healer’ is an unusual album that exerts a certain fascination from the very first listen, but its entirety may not be immediately revealed.