I'm not sure that fear is the best or more mature response to a band that seems like it's about to become too good but here we--me and The Cowboys--are. I've listened to Volume Three several times now and my brain's buzzing, freaking out because this band is just very, very good at what they're doing. Which in part seems because this band is absolutely, impressively, in control of the precise geography of their sound, their vibe, their aesthetic. They are not working from an outline they are working from the complete text. It's this simple: I got rapturous and bordered on asserting ineffability (which is, no illusions, a crock) in my review of Volume Two for NUVO, and I think Volume Three is better. 

The music here is unrepentantly made up of that citational tissue. Garage, doo-wop, genre signifiers all in a row like birds on the phone lines. "What music isn't like that?" Sure, but with The Cowboys there's a verifiable pleasure in always almost recognizing the something else in something that's theirs. The Cowobys do not run away from the ground of reference; they charge right toward it because they know tissue is torn with the slightest touch.

The melodies, especially when they're at their hookiest, are beset by specters of other melodies, ones I've heard leaking out radios my whole life. "Aqua Marine Love Machine" and "The Look on Your Face" are nearly references to something my memory has swallowed. "The most merciful thing in the world," H.P. Lovecraft said, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Listening to the Cowboys is like being overcome with a gleeful mercy. 

Vocalist Keith Harman has a way about him. He careens. He wobbles. I don't want to say anything about the vocal melody in "Cindy Lou." I just want you to listen. And the band itself sounds suspended on a rubber band. In "Funny Man" they wind up on the verses, ricocheting through turnarounds, before tautly thundering through the chorus. Or there's "Tysus" where they practice a very particular type of precision, the kind I'm not sure you can teach with a metronome. 

And then Mark McWhirter--Seth Johnson called him the 4-track physician--works his magic here, too. Or actually, per Arthur Clarke, his magic is not magic, it's sufficiently advanced technology that I don't yet understand. A fact made all the more remarkable by the backward-facing analog vibing of it all. The guitars sound thick, the vocals are slapped in the ideal delay, there's actual body to the drums. 

I don't know for sure how many computers were used in the making of this album, but it sounds like the answer is zero, which suits so well. That is not a value judgment (i.e. "fewer computers is better" is something I would never even imagine saying). It is, instead, an aesthetic judgment on something tightly controlled and expertly put across.