This is the recommendation part of the recommendation.

I suppose I owe you that much. You’re too busy to listen to the brilliance of a whole twelve-track experience. A 38:56 masterpiece. Philistine.

Nothing in this world could make me butcher such genius, hack it down to a paltry “top three”, just to accommodate your laziness, to tolerate your irreverence.

My own stubbornness, though, that might do it.

Here goes:

“Walks Alone” because I can’t resist the speed, the sheer energy, the adrenaline that it instills in me. It never gets old. Hey why are the fast songs never considered “the best” of an album?? Anyway- the song has no brakes. It just goes, verse after verse after verse with no real chorus or even a guitar solo – besides a four-bar, four-note guitar break between verses. And the lyrics are about some vagrant or something. A street rat. And how heeeeeeeeeeeee walks alone.

What’s great about this song, and about the Cows in general, and about their singer Shannon Selberg in general, is that despite their (self-imposed???) restrictions on their musical abilities, and their lyrics being similarly pedestrian (on this album especially: “He sits alone/In a park/’Til after dark/ etc. It’s not exactly poetry, y’know?), Shannon’s delivery still makes them hit the mark, catch the listener’s ear with patterns in meter rather than in melody, or measured, exact rhyme. Like spoken word, almost. OK wait so I guess it is like poetry. The Cows are poets now, I have declared them as such.

“Mine” just because it’s got this one line that goes “if you’re some commie scum that wants to share it all, remember, IT’S MINE”. HEH. The guitar’s going in both ears, constantly, in a heated argument with itself, with the bass and drums playing a comfortable and simple enough pattern to keep you grounded through that chaos. And Shannon isn’t screaming, but he’s definitely pissed about this thing that it’s imperative you know is his.

Let’s talk about the next song.

“Everybody” because it captures that feeling of being left behind by everybody because everybody is doing something and you’re not and you don’t know why you’re not or why everybody is doing whatever it is they’re doing but you suspect that it might just be because everybody else is doing that thing. Right? Well, the brilliant thing about the song is that it says all that and more clearly too but in only six words total, two of which are “everybody” and “something”. All the frustration, the derision, the circular reasoning, the bafflement, are conveyed by the simple repetition of these lyrics, in a melody that oscillates between like, four notes. It’s mocking them. Who? Everybody.

Aaand YouTube links:

Here’s the whole album again

And here’s my selected three

Now, my disciples, go forth and spread the good word of the Cows.

-Mans

The best cacophony ever to shatter your ossicles.

The Cows made nine full albums during their decade-long existence, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single one is sheer perfection, impeccable artistry the likes of which you’ve never conceived.

They lived in Minneapolis, and for the majority of their recording career released their music through the equally Minneapolite Amphetamine Reptile, with the exception of their debut (Taint Pluribus Taint Unum, 1987) which was made by uhhhhhhhhh Treehouse something. Doesn’t matter. I’ve got an album to talk about.

Cunning Stunts, made in 1992, only just beats out Peacetika and Orphan’s Tragedy as my favorite by the very narrowest of margins. I’m sure I could find some dud tracks somewhere in the Cows’ catalog, the not-brilliant, the less-good, the more-forgettable, but I could listen to these tracks all day and not really need to skip any. In fact, I do! For weeks at a stretch. It used to take conscious effort and much pain to tear myself away to listen to someone else for a while. And with me being a person who compulsively skips potentially incredible songs for fear of wasting a couple of minutes being bored, this means something, alright? Believe me.

Please?

This album is kind of an anomaly in the Cows’ discography, since it feels like, for the first time after four years of (almost) tuneless screeching on their respective instruments, the band spared a thought on palatability. And, for once, this wasn’t a catastrophe for their identity, a torpedo to their unique sound. Past albums were all about flooding your brains with noise, melodies that were more like anti-melodies that sort of dropped off halfway through or were just barely discernible, filtered through layers and layers of guitar-fuzz, or that didn’t give a solitary fuck about what you, with your innate human ability to detect concords and cadences and intervals and such, about what you expected.

Cunning Stunts, in contrast, decides to throw your ears a bone every now and then and not be so damn confusing. The melodies are there, they’re simple, they’re predictable, and they’re still dripping in electric noise, but not to the point of being obscured. Like “Mr. Cancelled”, which for the first thirty horrifying seconds, is tame and repetitive enough to be reminiscent of some kinda zeitgeist-conforming pop-punk TRASH, but just when you’re about to give up on life in general and your finger hovers over the skip-forward icon, the song accelerates for a little bit to give Thor (that’s the guitarist’s name!!! Thor!!!!!!) a designated space for his crazy little guitar flourishes instead of having them wailing in the background of the whole song, before returning to the comfort of predictability for a while. It makes sense, see? The songs just feel more constructed that way, more finished. There’s space, here. Parts left quiet or half-empty, where every instrument isn’t going off at once. “Down Below” is a favorite of mine for that alone. “Ort”, too.

The whole thing’s a pleasant listen, start to finish, though I should give prospective listeners a heads-up for “The Woman Inside”, the one track where Shannon decides he likes screaming too much to ditch it for a whole album. Of course, I still think it’s a brilliant song, though I would concede that it’s more of an acquired taste.

Now how do I link this album. Have they got a Bandcamp too or do I have to go hunt for legal YouTube uploads and painstakingly stitch together a playlist of my own? Why the fuck can’t these bands that don’t exist anymore make anything of theirs easy to find?

Alright, this looks legit enough. One o’ them YouTube “Topic” channels. Someone somewhere is getting paid for clicks, I assume. I hope it’s the right someones.

Fuck I forgot to address how stunning the cunts are. Or how cunning the stunts? What?

– Mans