With a Name Like That, Why Wouldn’t it be Good?

Riding a Ferris Wheel is like being inside Rob Crow’s head. Strapped into a seat, spinning around and around gazing at all the varying attractions and distractions within your line of sight. From crazy clowns to haunted houses to rigged water gun games, nothing is really the same, yet it all makes sense.

Such has since been Rob Crow’s distinct voice lent to projects of pretty lengthy extremes. Pinback guided many a hipster in their earliest years, while Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place is, well, something. It’s his iteration as Lord Phallus, the leader of the hilariously named Goblin Cock that’s deserving of the most attention right now due to the release of their third album, the even more hilariously named Necronomidonkeykongmicon. The album is just as difficult to type as it is to say out loud, but it becomes more pleasing once it hits the ears. It’s a metal record the way Rob Crow does metal, which at times isn’t all that metal to begin with.

Sure, “Something Haunted” opens up Necronomidonkeykongmicon with a doom sound even Electric Wizard could cosign on, but “Montressor” and “Island Island” have more math rock (and a little bit of prog rock) roots than anything darkly vile. Crow gives a more lighthearted punk vibe vocally as Lord Phallus, which makes the uninformed listener rely on the music for the actual heaviness. It’s there, like on the more goth “Buck” and the hard hitting instrumental “The Dorse”—the Necronomidonkeykongmicon ride just keeps going round, with or without the listeners’ consent.

That’s why it makes for a good album in the first place. Though classified as “insert whatever metal genre appropriate to smoke weed to here,” it ends up sounding exactly like how a metal album by the singer from an indie band would sound—like if Andrew W.K. beat all the members of GWAR in a game of beer pong and turned that into a record. What kind of sorcery is that? Who knows. Rob Crow probably doesn’t even know. But the album is called Necronomidonkeykongmicon for Satan’s sake, so what could really be expected?