Cowtown - Pine-cone Express Album Review

Cowtown
Pine-cone Express
(On The Bone / Chinchilla / Golden Lab)
Album Review

Deliciously catastrophic and shambolic, listening to 'Pine-cone Express' is like walking through a TV theme tune with Urusei Yatsura jamming along and Mark E Smith hurling abuse from the sidelines. If there was a competition for The Band Who Sounds Like They're Having The Most Fun Without Uttering A Word, Cowtown would reign supreme. Or more, likely, they'd come second and still be laughing.

Song-titles range from the 'hilarious' 'Curtis Tigers' (it's not really funny but it thinks it is and it is, really.) to the dubious 'Mr Pear Sandwich Man'. Regrettably the lyrics are all but incomprehensible. If we could only make them out, we could well be one step closer to enlightenment. I guess that can wait.

One minute we are blasted with a lo-fi soundalike of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, the next, the earlobes take a battering with skronky keyboards. The real secret, though, is that underneath the matching knitwear and fuck-fi recording techniques, these skronky keyboards contain the catchiest, danceable-est 30-second anthems this side of Kraftwerk and that side of the Crazy Frog.

Hayley Avron