Job For A Cowboy: Quality Is Job One

Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 29-Oct-07 @ 01:08 PM

Whether they're walking away from great opportunities or stamping some new character on the veneer of death metal, it's all in a day's work for the members of JOB FOR A COWBOY.

Story by Amy Sciarretto
Photos: Tim Harmon

"We don't get it at all," says Job For A Cowboy vocalist Jonny Davy over a crappy transoceanic cell-phone connection. Davy and his band are currently in Munich, Germany, and an overwhelming echo is triggered every time Davy speaks. But just like his band's music, the background noise doesn't mask the screamer's speech: His voice is even, rarely revealing any emotion, even as he comments on the viral way his band have worked their way up the metal scene to achieve status in a short span of time. JFAC are so hot, they're practically thermonuclear; but you wouldn't know it, given their unassuming attitudes.

"Before we ever toured, we recorded the Doom EP [in 2005] and we'd put songs up on websites, and it just blew up out of nowhere," says Davy. "I don't get it, dude. It's good for the metal scene, though."

Davy has a genuine fan mentality; It's not about one individual band, it's about the health of an entire scene, which, like any other, is destined to have peaks and valleys every couple of years. So while the members of Job For A Cowboy-Davy, guitarists Bobby Thompson and Ravi Bhadriraju, bassist Brent Riggs and drummer Jon "the Charn" Rice-might not understand their nascent popularity, they certainly aren't questioning it. They're just riding the wave seeing where it takes them.

They're enjoying the inspired YouTube clips fans are posting (see sidebar), and are happy that they're opening the doors on extreme music for not-so-extreme people. But really, are these kids (none of the members of Team JFAC are old enough to buy a drink at the venues they play) serious? Or are they being coy, merely pretending they don't get why their violent Metal Blade debut full-length Genesis sold more than 12,000 copies its first week?

As it turns out, the band members are patently astonished by the reaction to their refreshing interpretation of death metal: Blast-beat-laden songs; Davy's guttural growls, which sound as though they scaled the bowels of hell to reach your headphones; and a tandem of plate-shifting riffs played at breakneck speed.

"We're rolling with it," continues Davy about the band's acceptance. "It's weird for us, because it's happening so fast. We're trying to enjoy it, and just trying to keep things as heavy as humanly possible. This is a dream not every one gets to live."

The Arizona-based quintet longed to pursue their extreme-metal dream when they were 15-year-olds sitting in algebra class in high school. After school, Davy was managing a bar that showed movies, while Thompson was working in a bar and going to community college. Their jobs made them decent money for their ages, but the opportunities didn't stack up to being in a band-so they quit. Bhadriraju, however, had a much more difficult choice to make; he declined a full scholarship to college.

"There was so much riding on this, and there is so much potential," says Bhadriraju, 19, about his decision, which, amazingly enough, received full support from his parents. "Sure, I second- guessed myself about giving up school. But I told myself, 'Give it a chance.' I had to do it because it felt right, and now I look back and I'm happy with what I did. Maybe in five years, I can go back to school; maybe not. I don't know what'll happen. It's so scary because you have to follow your heart and do something bigger. There are all the crazy things that go on inside your head, but I am glad I decided to do it."

Despite the fan-driven hype and personal sacrifices, at the end of the day, a defined musical personality is Job one. The band-who will soon wrap up their stint as a featured attraction on this year's Sounds Of The Underground tour, ripping shit up alongside the thoroughly metal likes of Shadows Fall and GWAR-are breathing new life into death metal, a genre, whose heyday was arguably in the early to mid-'90s. (That would be before the Cowboys hit puberty.) These days, that scene seems to be highlighted by new albums from old bands (Cannibal Corpse, Obituary and Six Feet Under to name a few) whose best days are patently behind them. But JFAC are culling inspiration from genre-definers, as well as cult bands on the fringes,and coming up with their own modern, über-brutal blend.

"My mom and her boyfriends were metal fans," says Davy. "I grew up on Pantera, Metallica, Megadeth; all the classics. At a certain age, I realized I needed something heavier and more aggressive than what my mom listened to, so I started looking for something different, and I found it in death metal." In seventh grade, Davy discovered Nile's Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka, which he claims, "changed my world."

Thompson had a similar education. He started playing guitar when he was 14 and doesn't deny liking both mainstream and nü metal, which he discovered at the behest of his older sister. When he entered high school, someone hipped him to Darkest Hour's Swedish-metal-meets-American-thrash opus, The Mark Of The Judas, and he was hooked. Bhadriraju cops to loving this type of music, and that's why he chose to play it-no more, no less.

"We're all fans of this, so that's what we want to play," he says. "No matter what, we'll be content with what we do, and if no one likes it, fine with me."

Because of the youthful members' worship of death-metal bands with subtle traces of melody, one can see why more mainstream metal fans would gravitate toward JFAC. They're drawn to the slight hints of melody on scorched-earth songs from Genesis like "Embedded" and "Bearing The Serpent's Lamb." Thompson acknowledges that JFAC's attention to melody is what makes their music more listenable.

"Bands like Hate Eternal and Necrophagist are chaotic, technical bands, but they still have an aspect of melody. We're not nearly as technical, but we blend the same elements. We're about the fusion of extreme chaos and melodic metal. Maybe that's why we're getting noticed, since we're extreme, but not as extreme as other great bands. We definitely aren't thinking we're reinventing anything. We're just shining a light on it."

On Genesis, JFAC prove they are built for speed and power. Thompson and Bhadriraju play with a force that seemingly makes lightning shoot out of living-room walls, while the rhythm section of Rice and Riggs is an unstoppable four-armed killing machine. When the band set about writing and recording Genesis, former drummer Elliott Sellers quit, adding to the stress of making the album, which Davy believes upped the music's anger and hostility quotient. While the band were writing the album, Bhadriraju told AP in their "100 Bands You Need To Know In '07" interview that they were most interested in reaching maximum levels of aggression to win over snobby, elitist metal fans that were writing his band off as an internet-created flash in the pan.

But Genesis doesn't thrill solely with its gnarly, nihilistic metal. Davy, an atheist, took an ambitious stab at writing a concept album; but rather than travel familiar death-metal terrain (lyrics about blood, guts, gore etc.), he went intellectual, centering Genesis around an end-times microchip that has the religious right in an uproar.

"I've always read about different religions, and I didn't want to sound ignorant if I got into an argument about the topic," the singer says. "So I read and read. I read about religious conspiracies in general, and the one that interested me most was the VeriChip. The government puts a small implant in the webbing of hands and in the arm, for identification and medical purposes. It would also be used for currency and will cause paper bills in society to become obsolete. You could go to the grocery store and get scanned, instead of giving the store your money. This seems to be a serious invasion of privacy, and all these religious leaders are protesting against it because they fear the chip would represent the Mark Of The Beast, and the Anti-Christ would use it to control every man and woman in America. Christian TV [in America] has talk shows with people arguing like crazy about this!" It's another aspect that separates JFAC from the pack; like so many metal bands, they're not even slightly interested in bashing devout Christians.

"Since I'm an atheist, all the arguing the Christians are doing over it is ridiculous to me," Davy says. "It's the invasion of privacy that bothers me."

The high-powered thrash and complex lyricism in Genesis make for the perfect package of brains and brawn-as well as the promise of things to come. Bhadriraju sums up his band's climb to fame in a kill or be-killed fashion.

"You either like it or you don't. If it gets kids in there with us early, great. If it opens them up to other, even heavier bands, even better. Our music is not something that really grows on you, and we're totally fine and happy about that." ALT