Review Summary: The Cows gettin all weird on ya
From the beginning, this album lets you know it’s going to be a somethin special. Well, at least if you’ve listened to anything else by Minneapolis’ famed Cows. Usually a fairly traditional noise rock band, the quartet’s final album, Sorry In Pig Minor, goes for something slightly different. With production from Buzz Osborne, this LP shows the Cows’ usual angst and anger going in a much more schizophrenic direction. The perfect opener for an album like this, Cabin Man starts with some discomforting eerie clanking noises. After a couple seconds, a bubbly synth line and some guitar racket play across, already crafting a largely unsettling world within the opening moments. Vocalist Shannon Selberg comes in with a some strange poetry atop this, spouting a slightly nonsensical story about confronting a cockroach on a bridge and attempting to step on it, his voice in a tad more subdued tone than usual. As his tale reaches its climax, suddenly the volume is increased tenfold, Selberg begins to yell the final line of the story over and over with some loudass guitar and drums hittin you in the face, eventually settling down into the unsettling ambient atmosphere of the song’s beginning. This song pretty much sets the tone for the whole album: paranoid, cryptic and very disorienting. Pig Minor winds through a chasm of loud, layered noisy rock, complete with strange ambient sounds, pretty yet frightening keyboard driven tunes, and even a slight detour into jazz and mariachi. It’s like no other album by this band, although you can definitely tell who it is performing. The immaculate production really pushes this into classic territory, more so than any of their other releases (pretty much all of their other albums are amazing though). Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in jagged noisy stuff with awesome detailed production.
