Goblin Cock
Bagged and Boarded
5.7
In what must be the most striking misnomer since last year’s record store clerk flummoxing release from Josh Homme's The Eagles of Death Metal, the prodigious Rob Crow (Pinback, Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, and Optigonally Yours, among others) has named his newest project Goblin Cock. The moniker, along with the cover art consisting of said goblin seated on a throne with his impossibly long dong laying on the floor below him, hint that this is either a foray into metal of Probot proportions, or simply indie playfulness. It seems to be the latter, as it’s most not certainly the former. More telling than the band name and album cover are song titles like “Talking to Chaka”, “The Green Machine” and “Winky Dinkey Donkey” (Of course, there’s also that other way of interpreting the band name, if the first word is heard as a verb rather than a noun). Crow, or Lord Phallus, as he prefers to be called in this context, and his crew dish out nothing more than heavier and darker than usual quirky indie rock with little more than moderate stoner rock accents. Now, if you’ve been paying attention you know that I’ve nothing against indie stuff (most recently evidenced by my Logh review), but like McDonalds used to say, I like to keep my hot side hot and my cool side cool. So Goblin Cock’s juxtaposition of darker tones and lighter melodic sensibilities comes off as the best of neither world, giving it a flavor combination about as tasty as a salmon popsicle.
Turns out the Josh Homme reference applies to more than just naming tendencies. Crow has a Homme-like proclivity for genre melding songwriting and peculiar melodies and vocalizations. Although the similarity is more in spirit than in sound, Queens of the Stone Age comparisons can be made to several tracks. The percussion heavy “Striped Tiger Snaps”, on the other hand, actually sounds more like a heavier version of a song by the way indie Enon. There are snatches of heavier music on Bagged and Boarded–the intro to the album’s first proper song, fades in with an echoing, Sleep-flavored distortion, but is undone by Crow’s higher registered, dreamy vocal hooks. During passages of a handful of other songs the band circles with dark, choppy riffing as Crow delivers lower registered and less sugary vocals ("The Crusher" and "Kehgrah the Dragon Killer" are two of the more interesting examples), but these moments are heavily leveraged with melodic indie ethos. It’s actually that side of Bagged and Boarded’s personality (Crow’s more natural side) that offers more than the heavier leanings. In general, one gets the feeling that Crow is a talented musician that has made a miscalculation while drawing up the combinations for this effort’s genre blending. He knows what he is doing, but Bagged and Boarded simply makes me wish he’d move more confidently into metal or just stay away from it altogether. All of this ambivalence gives the album the appeal of, well, of an impossibly large phallus on a neutered mythical creature. And all cock and no balls makes Bagged and Boarded a dull beast.
