(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
The Cows were both clowns and delinquents at the same time. Their visceral style was full of sarcasm as well as of defiance. The bacchanals ignited by vocalist Shannon Selberg and guitarist Thor Eisenstrager, and by one of the rowdiest rhythm sections in the world, evoked the Stooges and MC5 via the Laughing Hyenas and the Butthole Surfers, but were also a self-parody for the entire alt-rock generation. 'Taint Pluribus 'Taint Unum (1987) and especially Daddy Has A Tail (1989) were merry-go-rounds of (deliberately) grotesque, brutal and perverted affronts. The Cows' riotous sonic nonsense got clad in a sturdier wall of noise on Effete And Impudent Snobs (1990). Their effervescent napalm-like beastly bluesy rave-ups began to betrayed a rootsy element, that slowly but steadily changed the essence of Peacetika (1991) and Cunning Stunts (1992), leading to the mature synthesis of Sexy Pee Story (1993) and Orphan's Tragedy (1994), perhaps the ultimate testament of their mad genius. Their art was the antithesis of elegance.
Full biography.
(Translated from the Italian by Nicole Zimmerman)
(This translation needs verification. If you are fluent in Italian and can volunteer to doublecheck it vs the original Italian text, please contact me)
The Cows (from Minneapolis) were formed when the historic punk bands Husker Du and Replacements had already gone down into history. The local background certainly helped
cement the sound of the band put together by singer Shannon Selberg and guitarist Thor Eisentrager, but that sound was closer to the hard-core of the mid-west, in particular to groups like Laughing Hyenas and Killdozer that, at the end of the 1980’s, had
revived the brutal sounds of the great bands like Detroit, Stooges, and MC5, further updating the brutality of the punk era.
The early Cows boasted the fury of those musical delinquents but they did not stop there. The spirit in which their albums were assembled and played was more reminiscent of the creative folly of the 1960’s than of the concise and gloomy anger of punk music. The Cows’ albums were always disturbing carnivals of madness, colossal harmonic games, and disruptive sounds.
Their first album, ’Tainy Pluribus ‘Taint Unum (Treehouse, 1987) was one of the noisiest albums ever. A riotous mass of screaming and crazy beats constantly submerged in the titanic noise of the guitar by Thor Eisenstrager.
Mother was a blasphemous hymn and totally askew. Yellowbelly, Summertime Bone, and Cow Jazz were as well. Compared to the Cows, the Butthole Surfers were an orchestra playing classical music.
Veined by the same blasphemy and chaos, troubling and abrasive, their next album Daddy Has A Tail (Amphetamine Reptile, 1989) took the form of a rock song post-hardcore, relatively structured and keeping to the essentials. The components of their music have inherited the worst vices of rock and roll (coarseness, vulgarity, and carelessness), and these were applied in a more or less casual manner to the harmonic structure derived from their dark music. The long blues of Park my Konk had much lilting, and was bound by strong distortions, and shaken by a sudden epileptic and tribal improvisation, and it showed. Repelling deformity, like in Bum In The Alley and Shaking
(with Eisentrager's epic solo), mixed with Birthday Party, Beasts Of Bourbon, Cramps, and Feedtime. This heterodox style stood out in their hard-rock songs, such as Camouflage Monkey, the hard-core escape of I Miss Her Beer, and garage-rock hymns like By The Throat, tracks that were horrifically out of tune and sung with the grace of a bouncer. However, their authentic spirit of anarchy in rock stood out in their frenzied, drunken revelry Sugar (omitted on the CD). Shannon’s voice echoes the great “shouters” as much as the garage rockers. Thor’s guitar could not have been more inelegant and imprecise, but in a commendable manner, in his role as an “electrical shock”, with a repertoire reduced to primordial noises. The rhythm section of Kevin Rutmanis (bass) and Norm Rogers (drums) have given the group a certain knack and undoubted versatility (at least in the drunken execution of the tracks).
Effete And Impudent Snobs (Amphetamine Reptile, 1990) began to put some order in the fray. Some tracks on the album paid homage in the most respectful manner to cultural radicals: the blues shuffle of Dirty Leg, the discordant boogie of Little Bit, and the unleashed square-dance of Cartoon Corral. There was even an instrumental novelty, The Emigrant Song, on which Cows once again mixed county, western, and ragtime (naturally in their own way). Memorial and Preyed On were oases of peace among the infernal noise. However, the arrangements were always creepy, rough, harsh, wiry, and acidic to the bitter end; and in the end, the triumphant pieces were absurd: the demented thrash of Whitey In The Woodpile, the uproar of Big Mickey (similar to MC5), and above all, the monumental blues of Nancy Boy Cocaine Whore Blues, played at full volume with Hendrix style accents and armored rhythms. Overall, the album was torrential and traumatic like the previous albums but better produced and played.
Peacetika (Amphetamine Reptile, 1991) signaled a reformation, one in which the group abandoned the more radical extremism in favor of artistic ambitions. Songs like The Man did not boast of decibels and distortions like those songs that preceded it: it conserved psychotic convulsions and underclass anger, but had an almost unconscious heavy-metal. The clanking rock and roll of Good Cop diluted the punk impulse for a time. Hitting The Wall was a rough and wild garage-rock, the only track worthy of their mangled sounds, 3-Way Lisa stole a bass riff from Cream, and the title-track, if nothing else, was an instrumental jam of the free-jazz style by maniacs.
The new mission was clearly indicated on the album Cunning Stunts (Amphetamine Reptile, 1992): shamelessly capitalizing on the successful pairing of brutal sounds and perverse lyrics.
Most of the album flashes by at supersonic speed, whether the
grotesque hard-rock fanfare of Heave Ho or
the space-voodoobilly of The Woman Inside
or the atonal, dislocated anthem of Everybody.
And over all the rest towers one of their most develish rock'n'roll mayhems,
Walks Alone, like the Cramps meeting the Ten Years After at Woodstock.
But not everyhting was burning tires and slashing daggers:
the martial boogie of Mr Cancelled, the
waltzing, melodic instrumental Midnight Cowboy,
growling echoes of the Seeds (Mine)
and
half-baked imitations of the Stooges (Down Below)
populate the album like worms on a dead corpse.
Selberg, a little bit of “Bukowski” of Minneapolis and a good deal “ham actor” of the same, and certainly a histrionic figure of
the USA province, had reached the zenith of his narrative skills.
Many considered this album their masterpiece, but a bit of their infernal
genius had been lost in the commotion.
While the group did not lose its class, albums like this one and the next - Sexy Pee Story (from 1993) were typical within the regression of the genre as it moved towards the mainstream (as can be seen with the Butthole Surfers).
However, Sexy Pee Story, if nothing else, had a rowdy inspiration, a level of folly that was truly genius, and execution totally outside the norm. The quartet searched the thick darkness of the genres, defacing them along the way: rockabilly (the great pantomime of Uptown Suckers), be-bop (the title track), soul (Mrs. Cancelled) and, in one of the most sensational semiotic reversals, even hard-core, from which they took their actions (Blown). These abominations, all venial, including the frequent walls of noise in Shipbeard and furious tribalism in Ch (seemingly incoherent but in reality connected by a subtle game of polyrhythm of boogie and thrash as well as maniacal distortions) were glorious, but they also enforced the concentrated whirling of screaming and noise of 39 Lashes and the continuous flow of distortions in The Ouch Cube, two of their most extreme chaotic sounds ever.
Orphan’s Tragedy (Amphetamine Reptile, 1994) followed the directives of a troubling and chaotic music but at the same time was complete and compact. Such was the track Cow Island on which they flow into a existential crisis with a saloon sort of feel, their new trademark; or the breathtaking rockabilly of The Bucket, or the epileptic swinging of I’m Both (like Horton Heat), or the unending square-dance style of Baby Love. If the Cows had a moral it could be found in the putrid blues of Pussy Is A Monarchy (which was also a porno-gothic story) and Pickled Garbage Soup, or in the tumultuous finale Smell Shelf, 6 minutes of derelict free-jazz. Over the years the strong recording by Selberg became a bit hazy, the Hendrix style show by Eisentrager became, if possible, more theatrical and deafening, like in the title track. Signaling this new period were, above all, the melodies: deeply immersed in dark noise, Allergic To Myself and My Bob did not have any reason to envy Nirvana.
At this point the drummer Freddy Votel came aboard, a living legend in Minneapolis (he was already with Television Before Christ on the albums Ex Cathedra and TVBC). Whorn (Amphetamine Reptile, 1996) was more vulgar and insane but largely a disappointment. The great initial progression and finale of Divorcee Moore were the best statements by the group. A Gift Called Life was one of their typical psychotic themes. A frantic tribalism and the whining of the saxophone free-jazz fired up A Oven. Mas No Mas advances to a frantic boogie rhythm with awkward wincing guitar improvisations. However, the slower and more melodic tracks struggle.
Cows represented the demented fringe of punk-rock in Minneapolis during the 90’s. Daddy Has A Tail, Effete And Impudent Snobs, and Peacetika constitute the heart of their story. It was truly these 3 albums (with the omission of about 6 or 7 tracks) which were overhauled and corrected to produce Old Gold (Amphetamine Reptile, 1996). After this noisy trilogy would come the more accessible albums Cunning Stunts, Sexy Pee Story, and Orphan’s Tragedy, albums of the highest level which positioned Cows among the great groups of our time.
Selberg must be acknowledged among the great vocalists of rock music.
(Original text by Piero Scaruffi)
Selberg moved to New York and virtually shut down the Cows. Their last album,
Sorry In Pig Minor (Amphetamine Reptile, 1998), is marked by ideological
confusion. More varied than ever, quieter than ever, far more subdued and
conceptual, and farther than ever from their punk roots, the sound now features
(too) normalized vocals and vastly tamed guitars. The highlight is the rhythm.
No I'm Not Coming Out approaches the grotesque storytelling of Pere Ubu
(wailing synth, syncopated drumming).
The instrumental Dear Dad is a demented deconstruction of the
genre of movie themes.
El Shiska is deranged tex-mex with trumpet, and
Felon Of Troy is a frenzied jam of free jazz.
But, for a rock and roll band of this caliber,
the stylistic variety is counterproductive.
Even the visceral garage rhythm and blues of
Death In The Tall Weeds and Salive Of The Fittest
is a pale imitation of their past fury.
The Cows have lost most of their raucous energy, although greatly improved
in sophistication.
When the band increases speed and volume, it has few rivals. That was the idea when the Cows integrated the spasmodic enthusiasm of hard-core and the wiry harmonies of Texana psychedelia and married the empty emotion of MC5. The singing of Selberg and a repertoire of minor tricks allowed the Cows to distinguish themselves clearly from the other “noise-makers” at the beginning of the 90’s. The monumental chaos of the first 3 albums was due to the amateur arrangement and production. However, both were better in the second round of their career. These discordant storms will trump any imitators.
After the band broke up,
Kevin Rutmanis joined the Melvins, while
Shannon Selberg and Norman Westberg (formerly of
Swans)
formed Heroine Sheiks and recorded a single in 1999.
Rape On The Installment Plan (Reptilian, 2001), with John Fell on
drums, kept that promise:
the band sounds like the Swans playing Cows-ian romps
(Nuclear Jeannie, Was a Man)
or the Cows playing
brainy noise-rock
(Space Invader)
Siamese Pipe (Rubric, 2002), Heroine Sheiks' second album, delivered
another dose of contagious hysteria. Songs overflow with
sarcasm and confrontation (Mass Suicide). The band is
frantic and visceral (Army Brat, Open You Up), and
Selberg indulges in despicable antics (Grab the Wheel).
The Heroine Sheiks' Out of Aferica (Reptilian, 2005), containing
the frenzied cowpunk of Break Up and the ramshackle
funk-punk of Mr Innocent,
and
Journey to the End of the Knife (Amphetamine Reptile, 2008)
continued Selberg's virulent, dissonant albeit lucid program
(the latter's title might be an appropriate metaphor to describe his entire career).
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