School Closing Conte Middle School in North Adams will be closed Wednesday, Dec. 3, as the investigation into a mercury spill continues.
The North Adams School Committee this evening at 7 will be held in the City Council chambers.
Light'em Up! North Adams kicks off the holiday season with its annual treelighting on Thursday, Dec. 4, at 5:30 p.m.
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By Kevin Liedel - September 21, 2008 iBerkshires Columnist
Monster Rodeo
If you somehow managed to kidnap Salvador Dali and lock him in a studio with a rock band for six months, you'd probably end up with something akin to "Monster Rodeo."
Exploding onto the scene like a Swiss version of the now-defunct but everlastingly funky Soul Coughing, Cowboys From Hell have produced an incredible and incredulous debut: a mash-up of rock, ska and acid jazz that is all at once poppy, alien and downright strange.
They've taken interpretational jamming to a whole new level (perhaps into orbit), and even after numerous listens, audiences will have a hard time wrapping their ears around this intergalactic audio journey.
With Christoph Irniger on tenor sax and effects, Richard Pechota on bass, and Chrigel Bossard on drums, the group won't initially strike anyone as typical rockers. Yet therein lies their charm: armed with a ferocious jam-band mentality and a penchant for analog-style manipulation, their genre-bending songs twist and turn like psychedelic snakes coiling along the Milky Way.
Irniger's saxophone proves to be as fierce as any overdrive guitar and twice as versatile, deftly blending rock and jazz qualities into the riffs. Buffeted by feral basslines and virtuoso drumming, "Monster Rodeo"'s melodies take on a wild, unpredictable quality lacking in many of today's polished studio offerings.
Listeners will know they're in store for something distinctive from the opening track, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cow." Alternating a system of a downlike guitar blows with sexy echo pulsations, the song skips down frightening alleyways and dirty sewer trenches before returning to its original seductive chorus.
The Cowboys enjoy doing this on nearly every offering, calming you in one refrain and then jabbing you in another, all with a kind of viciousness that would make Rammstein proud. The jazzy, free-wheeling bass of "Dunschtig" rolls along until an acid-washed guitar comes screaming down in frightening succession. Manipulated, guttural sax notes trickle over "Lonesome Bill," waiting for a more bluesy melody line to screech away. "Chrampf" sounds like Pantera covering Rimsy-Korsakov’s "Flight of the Bumblebee" (fitting, considering that "Cowboys From the Hell" was the title of one of Pantera's most successful albums.)
The Cowboys do eventually spread their wings a bit – on a subdued, spacey cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence." With a mellow saxophone line taking over for Art Garfunkel's angelic vocals, the track runs the gamut of slow 'n smooth to dosed-up ska and eventually morphs into a full-on metal rock opus.
Thus "Monster Rodeo" hits its first snag: spectacularly experimental and rowdy, it may push the "weird" envelope a little too far for some folks. Like Soul Coughing before them, Cowboys From Hell's initial draw may eventually wear thin on the most patient of listeners.
This comes in addition to some other minor quibbles, the most prevalent of which is a lack of any organized vocals. Though several tracks get a much-needed shot of the human voice (the rambunctious Andi Peter), "Monster Rodeo" doesn't have enough melodic muscle to be interesting the whole way through. Unlike the instrumental rock musings of Explosions in the Sky, Cowboys From Hell need an added element – be it a singer or a second guitarist – to provide another layer for their experimentation. Otherwise, they'll risk crashing the rocket before it ever gets launched.
That being said, Monster Rodeo provides a breath of fresh air in a stagnant rock scene, combining many familiar elements into a frightening new sound (Rage Against the Machine paired with a jazz ensemble, if you will.) Cowboys From Hell have produced a debut that is more than the sum of its parts, and hold the potential to reach much loftier heights – provided they fulfill the promises of their first step.
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North Adams kicks off the holiday season with its annual treelighting on 
Passionate about local sports? Into the environment? Obsessive about local meetings?
