Against Me! – As The Original Cowboy

As The Eternal Cowboy is my least favourite Against Me! album. It was my first introduction to them and it lead me to write them off quite quickly. My musical tastes hadn’t evolved enough to embrace them yet and it failed to truly captivate me. A year later their documentary – We’re Never Going Home – converted me to a fan and I’ve been one ever since, picking up their new and old releases along the way.

But to this day The Eternal Cowboy is still my least favourite release and despite having some great songs like Cliché Guevarra and TSR, I could never truly dive into it.

It is because of that that I was both excited and ambivalent to hear The Original Cowboy, the collection of demos that would eventually become their Fat debut. At its core, the demo suffers from the same unexplainable problems of the finished product, however there’s something here that makes me think that I wouldn’t have written them off so quickly had they released these originally.

To the casual ear, there’s not many changes here compared to their final versions – having not listened to The Eternal Cowboy a whole lot myself, I still find it hard to pick out some of the changes, but they are there.  The obvious change is the track listing, which has received a massive overhaul but the value of the release is in the more subtle changes as the changes in intensity, speed and production quality are minor but make a big difference.

The entirety of The Original Cowboy is much more in-your-face and raw than The Eternal Cowboy (excluding Cavalier Eternal which Fat Mike specifically asked to be placed on The Eternal Cowboywhen it was released). Tom Gabel’s vocals are harsher, on the edge of screaming for the entire time and worn out because of it whereas they are softer and better rested on Eternal Cowboy.   The music is more abrasive, with a more distinctive sound and higher use of distortion. The recording seems a lot dirtier, more akin to Re-inventing Axl Rose than The Eternal Cowboy as there is more ferocity embedded within it and it sounds like a unified album instead of a collection of random demos through haphazardly together.

Where The Eternal Cowboy was stripped down to an acoustic guitar on tracks like Unsubstantiated Rumours, they use a full band and go all out on The Original Cowboy and that intensity carries the album further than The Eternal Cowboy ever went.

Most people won’t need to check out the record as it is made more for the uber-fans and completists  but there’s no denying that if they had released these cuts originally, it would not have taken me as long to become a fan.