YMMV / Job for a Cowboy

• Broken Base: Their fanbase is notoriously divided to the point where there is no real unanimous consensus on any of their albums, and it is not uncommon for someone to only like one album and hate the rest of their output (usually either Doom or Sun Eater, though fans of the latter tend to like Demonocracy and Gloom as well). Fans of Ruination are generally the only ones who like most, if not all of their discography.
• Critical Dissonance: Fairly well-liked around the time of Genesis and Ruination despite being widely disliked in the metal community due to a mixture of frankly ridiculous amounts of hype and an extremely obnoxious, vocal, and frequently rude fanbase, as well as by death metal fans who refused to touch them due to their past deathcore stigma. Their later material has managed to gain the praise of both critics and metal fans, but Vindicated by History is largely averted; Doom is still very much polarizing, while current opinion of Genesis skews towards "a few good songs and a whole lot of filler". Ruination is something of a middle ground, and while fans of Doom still tend to be divided on it, the general consensus seems to be "Genesis, but much better", and there is also a decent-sized contingent of fans who see Ruination as their best work.
• Funny Moments: This half-disturbing, half-hilarious video that Nick did with Dave Davidson.
  • Nick providing a rundown of their van at the time that is dripping with sarcasm.
  • Whoever currently runs the band's page on Facebook (either Jonny or Al) responded to a fan who asked for their rumored fifth full-length to return to the Doom era stylistically by posting a gif of Judge Judy rolling her eyes.
• Gateway Series: Let's face it, if you got into extreme music in the late 2000s or early 2010s, odds are good that they were one of the first bands you got into; in turn, if you started with deathcore and moved on to death metal, odds are even better that they were the act that did it.
• Genius Bonus: While the actual nature of the protagonist's experiences in Sun Eater is ambiguous, the album's musical flow is perfectly in sync with an ayahuasca trip. "Eating the Visions of God" and "Sun of Nihility" are slow and moody (though the latter picks up a little bit), which corresponds with the preparation and ingestion process, while the tracks from "The Stone Cross" to "Encircled by Mirrors" are fast-paced but also peak in intensity around "A Global Shift" before they start to taper off (which is in line with the average rush of visions), and "Buried Monuments" represents the transition between the final stretch of the trip and the start of the "purge"/comedown. As anyone who has tripped on ayahuasca can tell you, vomiting is an essential part of an ayahuasca trip, and the jerky, dirgelike feel of "Worming Nightfall" corresponds perfectly with the violent but cathartic release of a purge.
• Growing the Beard: Genesis and, later, Sun Eater.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • PREHEAT PIZZA ROLLS! BRING ME APPLESAUCE!
  • The "Wheeeeeeeeee-whop" (the feminine-sounding scream followed by a drum hit in the "Entombment of a Machine" video).
  • "Knee Deep" seems to have been the first cover by SpongeBob's band.
• Never Live It Down: Doom on two ends. On one hand, you have people who still call them deathcore despite the fact that they haven't been a deathcore act since Genesis and continue to deride them for supposedly being a representative of the genre; on the other hand, you have Doom fans who still tend to be obnoxiously vocal about demanding that they go back to that style and tend to show up in comments sections to rant about how they're a bunch of sellouts who think that they're too good for the fans.
• Nightmare Fuel: Obviously, par their genre's course, their sound can be this to the unitiated, but JFAC can scare even the most die-hard of metalheads if they really try. Highlights include:
  • The music video for "Tarnished Gluttony" shows a man taking an apparently unconscious child piggy-back through a forest. While this may not sound unsettling at first, it is later on discovered that the man sacrificed the child for some Cthulhu-esque divinity. In fact, towards the end of the video, we see the man disemboweling the child's corpse and setting it adrift in the sea.
  • Sun Eater is a pretty unsettling album by itself thanks to its atmospheric sound a la Immolation, but the real kicker is that the protagonist of the album is having hallucinations about her world ending. It isn't known if she's under substances or not, but either way, it's still damn terrifying.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common reaction back around the release of Genesis, as their deathcore fanbase commonly decried their turn towards death metal and accused them of selling out by abandoning deathcore as a bid for critical respectability. Jonny would later go on to clarify that no, they weren't trying to make critics happy - their tastes had changed a lot since he wrote Doom with Andrew Arcurio while they were sixteen and in high school, and Genesis was an honest reflection of what they were into at the time.
• Signature Song: "Entombment of a Machine" and "Embedded". Zigzagged in that while they are their most famous songs, they no longer play them live.
• Vindicated by History: Jonny spelled this out as much in his explanation for their hiatus in September of 2020, when he stated that when they went on hiatus, they expected interest in the band to quietly die and for the band to be remembered as something of a flash in the pan. Instead, the Job for a Cowboy legend blossomed between old fans who continued to support them and a substantial crop of new fans (many of whom came from the tech death scene and jumped on board with Sun Eater), and the band became bigger than they had been even at their peak.