Job For a Cowboy: Sun Eater review

Glendale, Ariz. natives Job For A Cowboy have just released their new studio album via Metal Blade Records, Sun Eater. It is the bands fourth studio album since forming in 2003, sixth if you count the two EP’s, 2005’s Doom and 2011’s Gloom.

Sun Eater was again produced by Jason Suecof, who has previously worked with the band on 2009’s Ruination and 2012’s Demonocracy. It is also the band’s first album without long time drummer Jon Rice, who was replaced by Danny Walker in 2013. Sun Eater is far more melodic than Demonocracy and is so sonically different in fact that it’s like a rebirthing for the band.

Opener “Eating the Visions of God” is an emotional outpouring that serves as a defiant statement of intent, while “The Synthetic Sea” is a meticulously executed, aurally grotesque, hyper kinetic attack on your senses with all the carnage of a warzone.

The album is spearheaded by the skull-crushing heaviness of lead single and video “Sun of Nihility.” It and tracks like “The Celestial Antidote” and “Buried Monuments” are deafening wake up calls that blur the lines of the genre’s subdivisions.

Other standout tracks include the palatable discontent and face melting fury of “The Stone Cross” and “A Global Shift.” They are both exercises in visceral melodic brutality from start to finish.

Closer “Worming Nightfall” is the one place on Sun Eater that the band forgoes speed and technical wizardry in favor of slow melodic grooves, with devastatingly heavy results.

Here’s the bottom line- with a more melodic approach to the songwriting on the part of guitarist Al Glassman, re-vamped tempos and a marked improvement in the vocals of Jonny Davy, the band that helped set the standard for Deathcore is now redefining it entirely.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

-Eric Hunker