With a picture of a muscled and blood-spattered goblin on its cover, Goblin Cock’s sophomore album exudes tongue-in-cheek homoerotic imagery. The brainchild of Rob Crow, a musical mastermind who morphs between genres with the frequency most people change shirts, Come With Me If You Want To Live! is possibly the most original and enjoyable contribution to metal I’ve heard all year.
Goblin Cock’s music may seem to be the latest manifestation in Rob Crow’s musical schizophrenia. After all, he’s hopped back-and-forth between Beach Boys-style pop to arena rock to electronica. But this album actually fits pretty logically into Crow’s career. It smacks of equal parts New Pornographers and Jimi Hendrix; it’s noisy and bass-heavy, but its simplicity works in its favor.
The lyrics to this album are an expertly cliched cauldron overflowing with penis references and hyperbole worthy of a William Shatner monologue. My personal favorite is “Tom’s Song,” an ode to notorious pornographic illustrator, Tom of Finland, which was almost been mathematically designed to inspire steroid rage in its listeners. But, even though the words and imagery hilarious, they’re actually reminiscent not of death metal, but of the energy and funk-tinged rhythms of the late 1960s, when psychedelic flower-children were starting to discover distortion. The music goes back to heavy metal’s roots with a sense of humor that would make J.R.R. Tolkein applaud.
Come With Me is incredibly bizarre and outrageous, but its goofiness and fantasy-style storytelling are lovable and completely accessible. For stoners and metalheads with a sense of humor and a love for massive phalluses, this album is the jewel in a goblin’s sword. It’s a massive, ridiculous joke—but it’s a joke you can rock out to.
In A Word: Gloryhole
