Under the guise of Lord Phallus, Rob Crow delivers yet another installment in the catalog of his indie-metal side project: Goblin Cock. He is known for his work with acts such as Pinback, Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place, Prefuse 73, Optiganally Yours and Heavy Vegetable. Also known as a solo artist, Crow is a master of the indie-rock genre with many years of experience under his belt.

Goblin Cock as a band and side project serves as a political outlet for Crow with anti-capitalist and doomsday sentiments unlikely to be heard on his other projects. Their sound is much heavier than Crow’s usual bracket with heavily distorted metal guitar instrumentation and headbanging drums. Despite this, at its core, Goblin Cock is more of a hard rock indie band.

While the guitar is easily described as metal, the vocals and mastering on each album are still that of indie rock. Furthermore, the song structure and strum patterns are extremely atypical for a metal album, more akin to math rock framework with metal instrumentation laid on top. At the very least, they’re far from being traditional metal.

Necronomidonkeykongimicon is the third album from the group, serving as a safe continuation of its sound. It does not venture far from the overall musical ideals of the previous albums, yet it contains enough variety to be considered its own piece. As far as new additions tend to be, this album features experimentation with slower, more ambient metal instrumentation. Before, their songs were primarily upbeat and aggressive. Necronomidonkeykongimicon takes a step back, offering a quieter, more intense form of rage.

The album is particularly interesting for its song structure and unconventional rhythmic progressions. In order to describe it from a technical standpoint, imagine your average metal song with a 4/4 time signature with a typical BPM at around 40 to 50. The guitar for a more generic song in the drone metal category would have a four strum rush on every beat per measure, topping it off with a light cymbal crash. Goblin Cock, however, might take that 4/4 time signature, cut out guitar for the second beat and do an eight chord strum arpeggio for the next two and a half beats, diverting the time signature to 3/4 for the next two measures. Additionally, they might repeat this phrase five times before moving on to something wildly different for the chorus.

However, the technical eccentricities of the album don’t end there. As previously mentioned, one of the other indie rock signifiers is the lead vocals performed by Crow. Crow does not go out of his way to make himself sound more like a metal vocalist for this album; in fact, he makes almost no effort at all to disguise his usual singing voice. It is my personal opinion that this makes the album far more interesting. Anyone can learn to grunt incoherently into a microphone, but it takes an absurd amount of skill to develop the range and control which Crow exhibits in his vocals.

Perhaps the technicalities of the album fail to impress the average reader. It can’t be expected that everyone should understand how unique the album sounds just by reading some complicated ramblings in the university paper. At this point, it simply boils down to the simple fact that Necronomidonkeykongimicon is an incredibly unique piece of work, not unlike the band that released it.  

Anyone who enjoys math rock, metal, hard rock or indie may enjoy this album. It’s hard to narrow down the target audience to any one of these genres, but it can be said that the average listener has a good chance to find this album enjoyable. Certainly, Necronomidonkeykongimicon won’t be for everyone, but those that will enjoy it should certainly be able to appreciate the brilliance behind it.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 15, 2016 on page 8 with the headline: “Goblin Cock debuts indie hard-rock album, ‘Necronomidonkeykongimicon.'”