Westside Cowboy's 'It Goes On' Is the Loudest Argument for Guitar Bands All Year
Westside Cowboy met studying at a Manchester conservatory and started out playing folk and skiffle covers. It Goes On, out August 21st on Island, is their full-length debut after two EPs, and it arrived to the kind of reception debuts almost never get: Album of the Week at Stereogum, 83 from Beats Per Minute, and a Paste review calling it “the most brilliant rock release of the year.”
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: They cut it with Loren Humphry, who has worked with Geese and with solo Cameron Winter, and the Geese connection tells you what the low end is doing — it’s loose where it could be tidy. Jimmy Bradbury, Reuben Haycocks, Aoife Anson O’Connell and Paddy Murphy play like a band that learned dynamics from acoustic music and then plugged in, which is a different skill from learning them from records.
The Spatial Dynamics: The mix’s real trick is that all four members sing, and Humphry doesn’t flatten that into a uniform stack. Anson O’Connell takes lead on “Coyote”; elsewhere the voices trade and pile up. Tom Breihan’s Stereogum review catches the shape of it: “Almost every song builds into a roaring tower of joyous noise. Almost every song has at least one moment of delicate, heart-stopping beauty.”
Standout Performance
Haycocks, the band’s de facto bandleader, for holding eleven tracks of that to a single argument rather than a sampler.
Why It’s Certified
“Kick Stones (The Boys)” opens it, “Dobro” is the one that shows the folk roots, and “You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor” is a closing title with the song to justify it. Breihan’s summary is unimprovable: “They’re inspired by many, many bands, sure. But way more importantly, they’re inspiring.” Certified great.