Music Review: "Be The Cowboy"

“Be the Cowboy.” What does that even mean? Well, it’s an archetype of sorts, one that feels distinctly American: the heroic individualistic white male, unbound by any oppressive force, the relentless, reckless, self-determined traveler wandering vast, foreign landscapes where they wreak havoc, save the day, get the girl and leave with their coolness intact and without a shred of responsibility. If you’re an American, or even if you’ve simply thought about what it means to be American, you’ve probably entertained this archetype. Even if you don’t care much for Westerns, the desire to be the cowboy is imprinted somewhere in our souls. The goal, forever, when we hear those stories, see those movies and commercials, is to be the cowboy. No, not the weak, dependent damsel in distress or the demonized savage Native Americans. You must be the cowboy.

Mitski Miyawaki is a cowboy. She grew up migrating from country to country—from Japan to China to Turkey to Malaysia to the Congo to America. She is half-Japanese, half-American, in some sense, a foreigner and a question mark wherever she goes. Nowadays, she makes her rounds as a touring musician, rolling endlessly from town to town, waking up every day in a completely different place.

There’s something vibrant and exciting in that lifestyle, something that breathes pure confidence. In its tone of defiance and musical boldness, “Be the Cowboy” very much embodies the cowboy within Mitski.

But the album further complicates it, just as Mitski, a Japanese-American woman, disrupts conventional conceptions of  “the Cowboy.” The underbelly of all this individualism and traveling bears is a distinct sense of alienation. It’s the sense that you don’t really belong anywhere, that feeling of never making sense to anyone anywhere you go. The urge for intimacy becomes a delusion.

Each song on “Be the Cowboy” is its own self-contained world. Mitski simultaneously exists within each of these worlds as their architect, rather than a mere participant, jumping from emotion to emotion, soundscape to soundscape. She is taking a more God-like perspective, deliberately removing herself from the all too tired assertion that female songwriters can only be “confessional.” She still writes songs that are gushing with vivid descriptions of emotional torment and emptiness, but they aren’t necessarily about her.

For casual Mitski fans, the apparent lack of blaring guitars may seem like a shock, especially in contrast to her previous two records, 2014’s “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” and 2016’s monumental “Puberty 2.” Both albums found Mitski combining indie’s attitude of genre-neutrality and emo’s outlandish intensity. But if we are travel back further to Mitski’s time as a studio composition major in college, we find “Lush” and “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business,” her two album-length attempts at avant-garde neo-classical music. Before she rocked the electric guitar, she sat behind a piano and was backed by a student orchestra.

Now, she returns to those sounds while still maintaining the same genre-bending ethos that brought her to cultish indie limelight. She is also more assertive. No longer are there walls of distortion, double-tracked vocals or dense arrangements. Everything is clear, crisp and out in the open, projecting further than ever before. Mitski has said that she wanted to resist the idea of developing a “signature sound.” Well, mission accomplished. “Be the Cowboy” is something completely new.

The opening track “Geyser” is exactly as its title describes. The track unrelentingly builds to a cacophonous, yet sublime conclusion. Setting the mood with layers of ominous organ-like synths, a melody finally begins to take shape in subtle violin flourishes and Mitski’s gentle vocal delivery, only to be interrupted by brief spurts of glitchy electronics. Gradually, the mix is filled to the brim with decisive tom fills, epic synth lines, droning guitars and percussion. Although the song never stops charging forward, each musical element rings crystal clear in the storm.

Ending at a swift two and a half minutes, “Geyser” deftly takes advantage of its shortness to deliver something tirelessly potent. Despite the song’s relatively fluid structure, there is something identifiable and memorable, showcasing an impeccable merging of pop’s refrain-based immediacy and the more unconventional avenues of songwriting. Already, Mitski has laid the groundwork for what makes “Be the Cowboy” so brilliant.

This clarity extends to tracks slightly more within Mitski’s former domain. The delicately pained “A Pearl” begins with a glistening E flat chord. Returning to loud-quiet dynamics, the tracks shifts from clean guitar strums, swinging drum passages and complimentary bass notes to wailing guitars, overblown synth bass and pummeling drum fills. However, the song avoids the typical grunge formula, instead opting for a bridge section that introduces a D flat chord, drum passages that shuffle from the floor tom to the snare and back to the ride, and a heartbreaking descending vocal melody from Mitski herself.

Both “Remember My Name” and “Washing Machine Heart” are the album’s bona fide bangers. The former is driven by crunchily distorted guitar riff, a chugging bassline and an infectious drum fill. Despite the abrasive mix of these components, Mitski integrates them seamlessly. She is particularly clever in her use of open-hi hats, crash cymbals and the irreplaceable texture of distortion to enforce what is one of the stickiest hooks on the entire album. The latter track bounces to life with a rubbery synth bassline and heavy toms. Shy guitar chords and an almost Theremin-esque melody accompany Mitski’s vocals in a perfect demonstration of synthesizing the organic and the synthetic. On the other side of the spectrum, tracks like the country-tinged “Lonesome Love” and the dreamy “Pink in the Night” showcase growing proficiency with bare arrangements and building atmosphere.

I’ve spent an awfully long portion of this review waxing philosophy and musical jargon. And while those are all components that make Mitski one the most advanced songwriters working today, I ultimately return to her music because of how much it makes me feel.

Listening to “Your Best American Girl” for the first time remains one of the best musical moments of my life. I mean, it came out of nowhere! I had barely known Mitski for a few minutes and I was already sobbing like a child. It was almost uncanny how flawlessly that track found its way to my core.

Thematically, it discusses the pains of fundamentally not being “American” enough to be with someone. As a Chinese-American, that hit hard. The prospect of being “American” is almost just barely within my grasp. But there is always something inherently different about who I am. In my own cowboy-esque moment of identity crisis, I felt oddly distant from the two countries I both reluctantly called home.

And musically, as if all of that wasn’t enough to rip my heart to shreds, the song calls back to the ear-splitting power chords of all those crappy pop punk and emo bands that soundtracked the most angst-ridden years of my life. It was as though she had miraculously predicted a crisis I would eventually confront and had given the blueprints to it.

From an arm’s distance, Mitski has extracted the dejection, longing, confusion and melancholy she understands all too well, poured them into the seams of perfectly constructed musical puzzles where they may be clearly understood and embraced. In a sense, she has prepackaged the future, when all of our struggles have been somewhat made sense of, and provided them for our present so that we may cope and slowly make our way to that resolution.

Mitski wants us to be our own cowboy, to acknowledge the excitement it will bring and to confront its challenges with our heads held up. She wants us to know that it is all possible, that alienation and sadness and confusion may be overcome. Perhaps our relationships with art and creativity are a first step towards that.