cow tools by Band Argument

head over to oranj.bandcamp.com for beautiful physical copies of the album <3

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"In a rare press release regarding his most infamous Far Side panel, Gary Larson proposed that tools designed by a cow might “lack something in sophistication.” Band Argument needn’t worry about that in regards to their own Cow Tools; on this long-awaited debut album, this San Diego quartet delivers some of the most thrilling, graceful, and, yes, sophisticated prog-pop in recent memory—and not without a Larsonian sense of absurdity and play either. Band Argument is composed of multi-instrumentalists, San Diego natives, and longtime friends Sila Damone, Jake Kelsoe, Jordan Krimston and Shane Moylan, four collaborators whose musical vocabulary has grown together like a dialect shared only by quadruplets. In 2019, they arrived seemingly fully-formed on the Patchwork EP and Slides single, both exemplary pieces of slippery art rock that augmented its guitar-bass-drums palette with MIDI triggers and pedal-warped wonkiness. On Cow Tools, they manage to exceed those already-excellent releases. Each meticulously oblong moment manages to somehow follow itself with a more exciting one a moment before we can preempt it; “surely THIS is the big crazy part,” we might think, only to be met with a bigger and crazier part on its heels (the tracklist flows much the same way). The band accepts Palm, Guerilla Toss and black midi as reference points, but even these formidable bands haven’t managed such straight-to-the-jugular choruses as those on “Greenhousing” or “Offline Invocation,” to name just two. The mathy spindliness is still on full display (dig the breakdowns on “Dig That Well” and “Mango Bug”), but Band Argument trades art-school stiffness for pure sunshine and exuberance. Even when the album threatens to slow down—Damone’s lovely vocal melody on “Safety Line” sounds downright mournful compared to what comes before it—we’re suddenly yanked back into an ecstatic hocketing break straight out of the best mid-oughts psychedelia. Equally adept producers as instrumentalists, Band Argument splashes these compositions with enough textural luster to make us reconsider those old prejudices about rock bands working in DAWs. Cow Tools is the pop album that prog fans dream of stumbling upon, and vice versa; skimping on neither brains nor immediacy, these perfectly-paced 10 tracks are so awash with ideas that they must be heard to be believed."
-Skyler Pia, Oranj Discs

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