A new feature, which will run whenever someone feels like writing it, in which we examine the cover of an album that has found its way onto our promo shelf.

The Band: Goblin Cock
The Album: Come With Me if You Want to Live!

What caught our eye: The band’s graphic name and the delightfully dissonant reference to Terminator 2, which has no goblins but does contain a passing visual reference to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s steroid-seasoned dong.

Digging a little deeper: Nothing disappoints the serious listener like learning that an awesomely named band consists of dudes with boring names. The members of Boston’s Anal Cunt have uncool names like “Seth,” “Josh,” and “Tim.” The monikers of Goblin Cock’s members, however, are Lord Phallus, Bane Ass-Pounder, King Sith, Braindeath, and Loki Sinjuggler. This is awesome.

Taste Rating: 5/10: Goblin Cock’s first album featured a throned goblin king with a massive, purple, pierced penis snaking out from under his robes. The band’s sophomore effort, which depicts an armored and pants-wearing goblin fighting through flames to rescue the listener from mediocre stoner metal, merits a 5 (average distastefulness) by comparison.

This year’s music issue contains a mix of great questions: If full-length albums are dead, why do so many people still want them? Is hip-hop growing up or having its Yacht Rock moment? Can lo-fi recordings compete with the digital onslaught? What are the most…distinctive music videos of the year? Have cutbacks at big labels been good for hip-hop? Why has D.C.’s DJ scene been so off the hook? Why did vinyl sell so well?

And Washington City Paper has all the answers:

• Brent Burton explains why people still buy full-length albums.
• David Dunlap Jr. measures the maturation of hip-hop.
• Casey Rae-Hunter explains how the Cassettes managed to get so big on, well, cassettes.
• Ted Scheinman and yours truly sorted through a shit-ton of music videos in order to recommend 10 must-sees.
• Ben Westhoff argued that 2008 was a great year for hip-hop, despite the dry spell.
• Cole Goins caught up with local DJs and found out the secrets to their dance-hall successes.
• Don Carr took stock of the District’s big vinyl sales.
• And of course, everybody had something to say about the 10 best albums of the year.

Brent Burton observed earlier in the week that critics seldom mourn the absence of metal from mainstream top 10 lists. I’d go a step further and say that the only bands that don’t get shafted are the ones that don’t need reviewing–bands like GnR and Metallica, for whom critics dutifully went out of their way to praise even though neither band’s album was as good as the releases below (IMHO).  With four exceptions–TV on the Radio, Be Your Own Pet, Thrice, and Longwave–my list is all about the heavy-ass gut-thumpers (many of them from my home state of Florida).

[Ed. note: Rise Records distributed three of my choices, and Vagrant distributed two--I can assure BPB readers that I was in no way compensated for my shameless whoring.]

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Gene Ween hits the Black Cat tonight without Dean Ween, his music partner of the last 24 years. In my pick for the event, I paraphrased conjecture from Ween’s message board as to why: “Ween fans have speculated that Dean is taking a hiatus from the band to work on his fly-fishing. Others think that Gene wanted a little time to himself.”

I got in touch yesterday with Greg Frey, Ween’s manager, to see if I could clear things up (and–full disclosure–to snag some tix to the Ween show), and this is what he said: “I wish I could add clarity, but I’m guessing just like everyone else!”

So much for getting the scoop of the month…

Some forms of political protest are beneath contempt, and one of them is sporting–sans a shred of irony–a Che Guevara T-shirt. Yet most Che-sporting hipsters don’t know that Guevara opposed art forms that carried the taint of “imperialism”–including jazz and rock music. (Uninformed hipsters? Surprise!) My colleagues at Reason produced an eye-opening video about Paquito D’Rivera, the Cuban jazz clarinetist who immigrated to the U.S. because the Cuban regime was so anti-jazz (those who stayed behind had to hide their LPs or face arbitrary confiscations).

Journalists–even music journalists–are supposed to write somewhat objectively about their interview subjects; I suck at this. I don’t pitch softballs, but I almost always come across as curious rather than skeptical, and by the end of the interview, I’m practically rooting for my subject’s success. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’d like to think that when I interviewed Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, it worked really well, because we managed to talk about what informs her ideas about her art, and because I didn’t feel dirty afterwards.

Worden is a fixture in the experimental scene. She’s played with Sufjan Stevens, released two albums with her former band Awry, and just released her second solo album, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, under the moniker My Brightest Diamond. I really enjoyed Shark’s Teeth, and this is coming from a guy who–unless he’s stoned–would rather eat cat litter than listen to most experimental music. Worden plays tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel with Clare & the Reasons. Our interview is below.

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I listened to the five tracks that comprise Phantom on the Horizon over 40 times (some tracks more than others) during the process of reviewing the Fall of Troy’s new album for the dead-tree version of City Paper. As a result, I can sort of hum at least one guitar riff, which you can listen to below (and nobody hums to prog unless that prog is Rush).

But I’m not sure if listening to an album as many times as I did is good for the review process. Stuff that I didn’t like the first time around grew on me, though that fact didn’t make it into my review (the 400-word limit doesn’t leave much room for a discussion of personal listening habits). On the other hand, aspects that stood out at first–red-hot guitar solos and great screaming come to mind–gradually faded as I grasped the significance of the album as a complete composition. Compared to other media for criticism, it’s easy and–taking  a random sample from the music critics I know personally–commonplace for us to fall for the music we’re supposed to be reviewing skeptically. (Why is it that good film critics seldom have this problem?)

However, I can think of some great albums (Say Anything’s …Is a Real Boy) and great bands (Radiohead) that I had to listen to over and over again before I saw what was so great about them.

For your listening pleasure, a few seconds of “A Strange Conversation,” the second “chapter” on FoT’s Phantom on the Horizon:

And here’s a snippet from the review (or you can just read the whole thing):

“[I]t’s a worthwhile listen for anyone looking to dip a toe a into contemporary mainstream prog scene led by Coheed and Cambria, blending screamo vocals and mathcore rhythms with punk antics and an art-school sensibility. That’s a lot to pack into a tune, and Fall of Troy has recorded plenty of inaccessible or just plain noisy music in the past. (“Whacko Jacko Steals the Elephant Man’s Bones,â€� from 2005’s Doppleganger, oscillates between cacophonous technical sections and tuneless, distorted interludes.)”

I want to clarify that I don’t think Coheed (who I used as a gold standard of sorts) is mainstream, or that there’s any such thing as “mainstream prog,” but that within prog you can find accessible and less-accessible music (big, resounding “duh”). Coheed and Cambria, the Fall of Troy, and–to a lesser extent–the Mars Volta are easier listening than Dream Theater and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Behold…The Arctopus–that’s what earned FoT and Coheed the mainstream tag.

I still haven’t decided if Phantom will make my top-10 list. I’d like to include at least one experimental/prog act, and I’m currently considering Idiot Pilot’s reissued EP Heart is Long–even though it falls entirely on the experimental side.

Would anybody care to plug a 2008 prog album?

…is the name of the new Glassjaw song (first one in six years). Stream it from the homepage, but beware the noisy, drum-laden wait (totally worth it).

It’s heavy as a motherfucker, the screaming made me cry, and there’s not a smidgeon of electronica.

Brokencyde’s new music video, “Freaxxx,” has been making the critical rounds, taking its first bashing at The Stranger’s Slog, and another lickin’ on Videogum. I’ve imbedded the video below in hopes of inspiring a few more reader submissions for Washington City Paper’s year-end music video write-up.

Brokencyde - Freaxxx (Music Video) from Eat Cake Films on Vimeo.

Brokencyde is a popular act in the growing genre of screamo electronica. Mark Athitakis hates them. You probably will, too. I’m tempted to give them the same treatment that I did a similar act, but I kind of like them (especially their screamo cover of Flo Rida’s “Low”). Despite being vapid and generic, the music is fun and the screaming is top-notch.

And seeing as my iTunes library is 65% emo (think Brand New & TBS, not Rites of Spring), one could successfully argue that I’d be heaving stones from the parapet atop my glass mansion.

Feel free to unleash your anti-screamo/crunk invective in the comments.

No matter how you approach it critically, Scott Weiland’s sophomore solo album “Happy” in Galoshes sounds phoned in. From the uninspired and uninspiring acoustic guitar on “Killing me Sweetly” to the arena-rock shit-fest “Missing Cleveland” (Who knew Cleveland was a city worth missing?), “Happy” is just plain bad.

As an STP fan–I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar in the “Sour Girl” music video and the balls-to-the-wall riffage on “Wicked Garden”–I find Weiland’s new dreck offensive, especially since I did him a favor by quietly ignoring his first solo effort. My advice to Weiland is that he start shooting up again, bring back his clean indie-ish vocals circa 1999, gather up the DeLeo brothers and Eric Kretz, and get to work on that new STP album.

For your listening displeasure, 56 seconds of “Missing Cleveland”: