Review by Patrick Kennedy
Peacetika opens with the rollicking "Hitting the Wall," with vocalist Shannon Selberg alternately screeching and sneer-singing his way through lyrics that would certainly be catchy if you could understand them. With this album, the Cows continue to trim away at the massively noisy foundations of Taint Pluribus, Taint Unum, and Daddy Has a Tail, trimming the overload of distortion and harmonic dissonance away to slowly reveal a more potent, melodic -- but still peculiar -- noise rock vehicle. Eisentrager's guitar still shrieks and wails like a three a.m. cat fight, Rutmanis' bass still drips and oozes, and Selberg holds court vocally like a deranged court jester, but this time around, those elements have been tempered, and the band is beginning to fully congeal. Like most of the Cows' output, the album title is a clever linguistic finger pointing at the oddities held within, akin to the Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician, or Hairway to Steven. Though this is not the band's high-water mark, it's close, and by the time the next two albums emerged -- Cunning Stunts and Sexy Pee Story -- the Cows had hit their stride.