-crunch- ep, by cowman

-crunch- ep

by cowman

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	1.	tobacco eyes ≠ turpentine 09:53
	2.	concrete pink dots 04:35
	3.	bloody diffuser 10:08
	4.	tobacco eyes 03:06

about

First new release in 10 years! These were recorded for an aborted album - one is a Sonic Youth piss-take, the other is an MBV rip-off. Seems a good time to let them out as a full LP of all new stuff is coming in the autumn/fall. Yay! Give it a full 'MOO' y'all!

As played on BBC 6 Music! Thanks Tom Robinson: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019ym6

credits

released July 26, 2022

From Aural Aggravation:
Christopher Nosnibor auralaggravation.com/2022/07/20/cowman-crunch-ep/

The multi-talented, multi-discipline and perhaps, sometimes, not-so-disciplined Benjamin Heal returns in his Cowman guise, under which he’s been operating since 2005 with a new EP, his first in a decade, after previous creative detours with Coaxial and various other projects.

Over the course of a sporadic and low-key career, li-fi, slackerist Cowman has – impressively, whether by fluke or by design – appeared on bills with a slew of cred cult acts, including Ack Ack Ack, Gum Takes Tooth, Cove, Pifco, and John Parish. These notable highlights are well-deserved, but it’s a pleasure to witness cowman making a comeback, instead of simply revelling over former achievements.

Crunch is a magnificently loose knockabout and if Pavement comparisons may seem lazy shortcuts, they’re also entirely justified. But then… then… there’s a whole lot more. The first track, ‘Concrete Eyes # Turpentine’ , with its inexplicable punctuation, starts out a fairly straightforward, if angular indie kicker in the vein of Slanted era Pavement, with wonky, off-kilter guitars that sound vaguely out of key, but then spins off into an epic swirling expanse of psychedelic post-rock. The whole thing is almost ten minutes long, drifting into a long, sluggish drone in the final minutes.

There’s an easygoing picked guitar line that contrasts with jittery drums on ‘Concrete pink Dots’ before the distortion kicks in, and it does so hard, creating a dense whorl of noise that almost buries the drums, until they surrender to the barrage of din, and we find ourselves drifting in a cloud of hazy shoegaze guitar. It’s mellow, but it’s loud, and that’s where the hypnotic ‘Bloody Diffuser’ picks up as it embarks on another ten-minute sonic journey, a slow-smouldering soundscape heavy on delay and reverb. Switching through a succession of segments, where the transitions are jolting, flicking changes rather than seamless transitions, it’s by turns doom drone and psychedelic drone, but ultimately, it’s all the drone – and that’s a good thing.

Ordinarily, two versions of one song on the same release feels a bit lazy, but then again, I spent the 90s buying singles on three formats in order to obtain all the versions and B—sides, and I have a hunch that Benjamin is also well-versed in the maxi-single and the like, and it so happens that the cropped version of ‘Tobacco Eyes’ that rounds it off actually feels like a single that had it been released circa 92 would have been lauded in the press as being in the vein of Pavement and Truman’s Water. And in fairness, that’s just as true in 2022.

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cowman Taiwan

Milking the farmyard since 2005.
Shared stages with Yowie, Trumans Water, Ack Ack Ack, Headquarters, Francis Harold & the Holograms, Gum Takes Tooth, Cove, Hunting Lodge, Dethscalator, Pifco, Geisha, Big Joan, Mugstar, Infants, Trencher, Soe'za, His Naked Torso, John Parish, Paper Hats... ... more

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