A band's 2nd album is always going to be a monumentally important project. Fuck it up and you risk losing whatever meager success you've managed to scrape up so far, but blow things out to far and you could spin the cars right off the car. Stablemates King's X delivered a knockout with their sophomore effort Gretchen Goes to Nebraska a few years prior to the Cowboy's debut platter and with Sam Taylor again taking the producer reins along with Brian Garcia and old ally Steve Ames handling engineering, Space in Your Face dropped in June of 1993 to follow up on the modest buzz generated by Galactic Cowboys, further cementing the group's signature style of injecting booster shots of thrash riffing into the veins of their melodic rock.
The lead-in title track gets the blood pumping right out of the gates before dropping two mid-tempo rockers in the listeners path, erasing any potential doubts that the group would be dialing the harmonies or choruses back this time. "Circles In The Fields" and "Blind" continue the procession of solid, melodic riff-fests while the delivery and production return as good as last time. Monty Colvin's bass tone in particular cuts sharply through the other instruments and provides an excellent low end cushion for the rest of the music to rest on as Dane Sonnier maintains a nearly identical and instantly recognizable guitar tone throughout the record. Unfortunately that familiar tone coupled with the generally similar compositions contained on Space in Your Face contribute heavily to the sense of Deja Vu that listeners may notice while hearing tracks like "You Make Me Smile", "Blind", and "If I Were A Killer". The writing is still sharp, but the problems that brought the previous record down are still around, namely the length of the songs. Like before they're mostly too long, but generally the material here is less technical on the whole so longer songs like "Blind" and "No Problems" feel longer (and are longer, honestly) than they really should because you're hearing the same passages repeated more frequently.
Space in Your Face seems to have been created to appeal to the same fanbase that ate up Galactic Cowboys without changing up the recipe too drastically, but instead of expanding on their sound they put it in a kind of stasis, not really progressing into any new territory besides "Still Life of Peace", which is a hidden track, but not really regressing either: all the elements of their sound on that first album are still here, there's just... more of it. More of a disc 2 than a distinct body of work in its own right, Space in Your Face feels like the Faith Hope Love for the Galactic Cowboys: well put together and with some actually great material ("Where Are You Know" in particular), but it feels like they went through a checklist of what a Galactic Cowboys record should sound like rather than what it could sound like.
C
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