Against Me!

The Original Cowboy

(Fat Wreck)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

To hear a certain segment of Against Me! “fans” tell the story, As the Eternal Cowboy was when Tom Gabel and his band began to lost their way.  The year was 2003 and the Florida punk rockers were showing signs of no longer being content to put out their music on homemade cassettes and play sweaty basements.  Eternal Cowboy came out and was, lo and behold, a little more polished than its predecessor.  Some fans cried “Judas!”  As the band’s audience grew, so did the number of people who were supposedly in the audience all along (a source of aggravation for Gabel, who clearly still remembers when packed houses and affectionate audiences didn’t seem to be in the cards for his odd acoustic/anarchist leanings).

The Original Cowboy is an interesting “What if” – the demos that the band recorded in a whirlwind session to get prepped for the studio (and give producer Rob McGregor an idea of what to expect).  For the most part, the differences are obvious but not especially profound.   Part of Against Me!’s considerable power has always been its energy as a live band, and the demos better capture that warts-and-all spontaneity and exuberance.  As a demo goes, it kicks the ass of most finished products.  In comparison to Eternal Cowboy, it’s pretty much a fight to the draw.  With that said, fans who hate any whiff of calculation, polish or second drafts will surely see Original Cowboy as an improvement.  Maybe Gavel is even one of those people.  “There’s a part of me that feels foolish for ever recording these songs a second time,” he admits in the press release for the album.  Of course, that also means that there’s a part of him that is glad he did.

It feels a little bare-bones for a stand-alone release, especially since most of the people who buy it will already own Eternal Cowboy.  Major fans should come away satisfied because it sheds some insight into the band’s process, and there’s some great material on display.  Good thing, too, because there isn’t any window dressing – no bonus tracks and not even a nice booklet.  A deluxe reissue of album and demos wouldn’t really have worked because there’s too much overlap – and, besides, would it really have been time to reissue the original anyway?  The most dramatic difference is the track sequencing, which flips the “Brief Yet Triumphant Intermission” up to the top of the running order (renamed “Introduction”), omits “Sink, Florida, Sink” altogether and brings “Cavalier Eternal” up to mid-album, closing instead with the fierier “Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists” – which is a better choice for tying the album together.