Vehicle: You Are Not A Cowboy Vehicle
Esco Romanesco Records
Out now
Since their fuzzier releases in 2024, the cult favourite garage rock of Vehicle has slotted neatly between art rock, ‘60s experimental pop and the leftfield glam for which Geese came to fame.
Vehicle’s debut album was among the closest a modern band has come to being ‘Dylanesque’; cryptic, intriguingly tuneful, yet positively bareboned. Where that collection was closer to the surrealist, almost freak folk of Bringing It All Back Home, the psychotropic slow-burn single ‘You’re Not A Cowboy’ is more akin to Highway 61 Revisited, gleaming with inverted blues ancestry and the white-hot zeal of counterculture. There are also allusions to Ty Segall’s spiky psych, multiple varieties discordance within moments; whether they are ringing out in arpeggiated strums or mercurial lead runs, the guitars are the jangliest Vehicle have performed. This contrast, and Vehicle’s driving force, Michael Cable, sings elusively about current cultural waves, maintains their distinct grasp of highbrow curiosity and direct hookiness. Cable says the track enacts an alternate reality where The Fall’s irascible frontman pilfered the essence of this type of ‘60s music – the perfect contrast for what he describes as an “insular country fanatic casting suspicion on the rising trend of Americana in alternative rock”.
The track comes alongside the elegiac My Future Wife (I Love You), out now on Esco Romanesco Records as a 7” (which immediately sold-out). Vehicle also have several shows later this year, playing London, Leeds, Manchester, and more.
Listen to the new single.
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Follow Vehicle on Instagram.
Words by James Kilkenny. See his Louder Than War archive here.
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