Some records are so pocked, dented and downright dishevelled, you just have to love ’em for their flaws. Others are so smooth and hi-gloss, they leave the listener scrabbling for purchase like a cat on glass.
Cowboy X’s debut belongs squarely in the latter category. Who Are These People? is an expertly produced record that oozes high street style, a masterclass in how the home recording and digital editing set-up can easily replicate and/or sync with big budget deck-of-the-Starship-Enterprise technology.
This trio – Karen McCartney, John Hanley and David Grealy – announce themselves as new pop pilgrims cherry-picking the shiniest samples from the jingle-tree and recombining those parts into a showroom-standard polyglot of Blondie, The Breeders, the B52s and, mostly markedly, the sort of creepy electro art deco that distinguished the first Garbage album.
But while McCartney is an alluring vocalist, and the backroom boys have undoubtedly gotten their money’s worth out of that subscription to Modern Recording Monthly, a good half of the songs suffocate under the same sheen that makes this album sound like a million dollars. Yes, ‘Gabbi’, ‘Live And Learn’ and ‘Between The Hit And The Miss’, could be dancefloor-fillers in some domed lunar colony disco circa 2106, but the formula doesn’t hold over the half hour. ‘Smaller Faster Cheaper Better’, ‘Kickback’ and ‘Do Not Pass Go’ are immaculately aerobicised but strangely glass-eyed ditties that go directly in one ear and out the other; less expressions of ecstasy, anger or woe than sterile assemblies of intros, outros, hooks, verses, choruses and middle eights.
Who Are These People? is perfect product, but is that all there is? Cos if that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing…