Album Of The Week: Westside Cowboy It Goes On

You need a particular kind of brilliance to take sounds and elements the ideas that we have heard a million times and to make those things feel visceral and exciting and new. Westside Cowboy, a very new band from Manchester, have figured it out. On their full-length debut It Goes On, they keep going back to the same wells as countless indie rockers before them — drawling monotone voices, intricate tangles of guitars, non sequitur lyrics that verge on abstraction, passionately wailed backup harmonies. You can pick out little pieces and diagram exactly which influences they're cribbing. But Westside Cowboy attack those sounds with such explosive, headlong joy that those kinds of rock-critic games just stop mattering. When they truly achieve liftoff, which they do a lot on this album, you have to stop thinking of them as a reflection of the past and more as the future. They're inspired by many, many bands, sure. But way more importantly, they're inspiring.Westside Cowboy understand the build. Consider the single "Pin Up Boys," one of the best straight-up guitar-rock tunes I've heard in the past year or so. It opens with Reuben Haycocks muttering over clanging, buzzing guitar chimes. H...