REVIEW: Life is the Meaning on Westside Cowboy’s Debut Album, ‘It Goes On’
WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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For 35 minutes, you’ll feel young and ready to grow old at the same time
Merging quiet and powerful, Manchester-born band Westside Cowboy strips things down to the basics on their debut record, It Goes On. It’s pastoral rock, a sonic mimicry of the stripped down grass field music videos we’ve become accustomed to seeing.
While that sounds like it can get boring quickly, the band keeps you on your toes by constantly throwing different elements that shock your system like a freezing cold shower. This is primarily driven by each member of the quartet - Jimmy Bradbury, Reuben Haycocks, Aoife Anson O’Connell and Paddy Murphy - providing vocal performances in addition to their instrumentation. There are real standout moments within this, specifically from O’Connell, who gets to assert herself at the end of “Pin Up Boys” and seamlessly into “Coyote.”
That two track run serves as a perfect microcosm of that grander theme found throughout, the aforementioned quiet and powerful: “Pin Up Boys,” through its powerful guitar and drums, plays like the coming-of-age movie you discovered at 11 years old and daydreamed about in all your quiet moments, inserting yourself in as a character; “Coyote,” meanwhile, sharing a name with Joni Mitchell’s famed piece, also brings her arresting yet sweet sound. It freezes your body but leaves your brain untouched to wander out to the lush plains you wouldn’t know firsthand from the farthest thing in the world.
Comparisons have been made to other bands, whether Sonic Youth or Pavement, and it wouldn’t be fair to blame them for that, given the fact it’s a debut. But that actually doesn’t come through when listening - where it would’ve been easy to be derivative, their sound is individual and fresh. It’s the mark of confident creatives, sure and unwavering in their vision.
Take “Worried Age,” which would play perfectly as the song over a TikTok edit of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (or any other movie in that vein; I’ve been thinking about coming-of-age movies a lot recently, as might be obvious to this point). There’s soft, then there’s flourish. Same on “Well Done Kid, You Did It.” Same on the opening track, “Kick Stones (The Boys).”
There’s a concept of different approaches to dream analysis that feels perfect to place this album and this band at this exact moment in time. One from Carl Jung, one from Sigmund Freud. When a patient would go and describe their dreams, Freud would go down and dig into the person’s biography. What about the person’s past tells us how they got to that dream? Jung would go up, finding a story from mythology that contains the dream within it at a certain point. Finding where the dream lies plots out the next steps in the person’s journey, what they need to do and where they need to go. Combine the two, and you find the dream to be in the middle.
If we imprint the album as the dream, we can see where Westside Cowboy has been and where they’re going. Based on that, there’s plenty to be excited about. For many, they’ll serve as a soundtrack to life and how to live it.