Review Summary: A track so nice, I reviewed it twice!
In my review of
The Lonesome Crowded West (Links don't work, see comment -Ed.) I asserted that it's the greatest Western album (note the capitalization!), and in so many words that "Cowboy Dan"'s the best track of the album. I guess by associative property that means that "Cowboy Dan" is the greatest Western song. I'm not sure how I feel about that―the mind reels at such an Earth shattering revelation―but at least it justifies the existence of the single with far too long-a name:
Too Many Fiestas For(sic) Rueben / Cowboy Dan, hereafter
TMFFR/CD.
TMFFR/CD (just rolls right off the tongue) is almost too short to even be considered a single. The other track, "Too Many Fiestas For Rueben" is little more than a minute long. It's a fun little number about―in my imagination
King of the Hill's Joseph Gribble a decade later. It's abrasive-yet-catchy in Brock's own quirky way, quickly grew on me and is actually quite fun to sing along in your purposefully worst singing voice.
But really it's all about "Cowboy Dan", the Greatest Western Song™. If you're reading this odds are good you've already heard and love[d]
The Lonesome Crowded West, but if you haven't you couldn't have picked a better paragraph to stumble on, I'm only sorry you had to get through the previous two to get here. "Cowboy Dan" is a very stirring faux country-and-western call to arms by the titular Dan, a cowboy being slowly strangled by urbanization, gentrification, and the consequential displacement. Oh yeah, and it's like an indie rock song by an acclaimed band with like guitar solos and hooks and stuff. It's a different mix and recording of the track from the one on
The Lonesome Crowded West, and the superior one at that.
Why's it superior? It feels strange to say, but the album was holding the track
back. Comparing the two, it seems like the album mix was toned down in nearly every way so that it'd better slot into the album as just one part of a larger whole. In a sense, they took all the sharp edges out of a song whose entire raison d'etre is to deliberately be as cutting as possible. Free to stand on its own this new mix is lush with more of everything: Brock sounds louder and angrier, the quiet of the bridge has more room to breathe, greater distortion on the guitars amplifies their twang nicely, the addition of a fiddler is easily the best part of the mix and he plays with a level of soul I didn't think possible on the instrument, and in the starkest change the ending is louder, more aggressive, and more varied. To me at least, in the original mix the last minute is so much noise that's far too easy to simply tune out by accident. Not so here. Everything about this mix is better, and it behoves you to hear it.
No track, not even the Greatest Western Song™ needs this many words to say it's good, so if you're looking for a tl;dr it's simple. If you know Modest Mouse this is their best work improved on every level by a new mix, and if you
don't know Modest Mouse there's no better single track to start with, though you really ought to listen to a whole album instead. Oh yeah, and "Too Many Fiestas for Rueben" is good too.
