black cock

At the core of Robot Child With a God Complex, Black Cock‘s debut CD, are claustrophobic pop songs trying desperately to crawl to the forefront. ?Starfleet Destroyer? has a win-ning bubblegum =70s Saturday morning cartoon cheery boy-girl back and forth thing filtered through distortion and whining Moog; ?45? buries the darkened tentativeness of the vocals beneath heavily tremoloed guitars and helicoptering LFO‘s and math-rock drums.; ?Cheating? makes you think they are gonna play straight with you before it explodes into feedback guitar and harmony vocals.

Kelly Minnis - 979 Represent

Stripped to bass and drums, Black Cock could be mistaken for another Jesus Lizard knockoff. Like Black Flag's Damaged, however, Robot Child derives its power from a stark, terrifying musical vision that subsumes and transforms an otherwise unremarkable rhythm section. Bandleader Chico Jones treats rock riffs as only the basic foundation of Robot Child's songs, most of the disc's compositional force coming from ingeniously produced vocals and a wide variety of keyboard sounds. Jones makes use of an incredible array of microphones and mixing techniques to turn the band's voices, layered into simple but darkly beautiful three-part harmony, into a hellish and unstable chorus, at times approaching something between Mike Patton's screeching randomness and a B-grade sci-fi version of Animal Collective. It's an extremely unconventional approach to punk rock, which yields the most unique disc Austin's Australian Cattle God has released so far.



- Austin Chronicle

It’s tempting to dismiss Black Cock as some sort of novelty or talk about the band – since it’s probably a safe bet that their moniker has nothing to do with obsidian feathered fowls – in purely euphemistic terms. Scratch that, it’s beyond tempting. In fact, this author wrote half a review filled with potentially offensive dick jokes that were potentially completely unfunny. While not quite as fun, it’s a bit more challenging to actually discuss the music on the Cock’s newest album Robot Child With A God Complex (Australian Cattle God Records). The short review is: Upon first listen, Black Cock sound almost exactly as one would expect a band named Black Cock to sound. They are relatively abrasive, edgy enough to be punk, and dark enough to appeal to goth and industrial listeners. But, since that’d be a cop out to just say, “Look at the damned band name. Be honest! You’re either going to love them or hate them…”

Here’s the longer review: Black Cock sound almost exactly as one would expect a band named Black Cock to sound.

No, seriously…

On Robot Child With A God Complex’s opener, “A Fast One”, Ben Kent’s drums pound out a frenetic tribal beat before the rest of the band kicks in. Whitney Lee caterwauls and chants about dodging war like Cassius Clay, before she sings with herself and a wall of synthesizers. And that’s just in first one minute and fifty three seconds of the album! This pattern is arbitrarily repeated throughout the album – pounding drums, walls of distorted throbbing keyboards, and Lee’s voice alternating between shrieks and some really great singing. On “Harvey’s Machine,” which follows the opening punk stomper, Whitney’s voice ethereally blows over what could be a stripped down late-era Nine Inch Nails tune. Black Cock is really that far all over the map, which is why they are deserving of more than the short review above.

Throughout their album, Chico Jones and Jordan Lee consistently add layers and layers of guitars, keys, and voices. Taking a cue from industrial rock bands, Black Cock produces a fuzzy wall of clanking sound and clearly is not afraid of the studio. Witness “45”: one of the longer tracks clocking in at just over four minutes, the band builds a dense forest of dissonant guitars, gurgling synths, and howling voices. Forget the A-Frames, this band has mastered the sound of the apocalypse. In fact, if whomever is in charge of the soundtrack for the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is reading this: use some of Black Cock’s music, perhaps “Beats” as the Father and Boy run away from those scary bastards who plan to rape and/or eat them (if this just ruined it for the five people out there who aren’t on Oprah’s Book Club list — oops).

Black Cock really is what one would expect from a band named Black Cock. But, they’re also a really interestingly perverse, dark, and confounding band. No two tracks sound alike, but the album somehow seems cohesive. While it’s doubtful, for those who don’t enjoy it, what’s the worst that can be said? Black Cock didn’t get me off? Black Cock left me unfulfilled and empty? Fortunately, the odds are that a lot of people are going to be satisfied and wanting more Black Cock.

- Austin Sound

Black Cock, Robot Child With A God Complex
One of the cruelest things about Black Cock’s relentlessly brutal debut is that it’s actually really good, forcing us to spend the year saying, “We really like Black Cock… No, really.” Hilarious, dudes (and lady-dude). (Perhaps next year some talented motherfuckers can start a band called Eating My Own Poo, or Touching Children Inappropriately.) Like its up-yours moniker, the sci-fi conceit of that title is no accident either: A post-apocalyptic unease pervades the disc, as the twisted-steel slam of the guitar and drums—those last remaining soldiers of mankind’s resistance, nihilists who spend their days blasting Jesus Lizard’s Goat in their tanks to pump themselves up—are dive-bombed by the buzzard-like screech of a battalion’s worth of synths, sparking an album-long back-and-forth tumult between man and machine that was way more entertaining than Terminator: Salvation. Even the ostensible human vocals are vulnerable, stretched and pitched into an otherworldly, bewitching, permanently sneering Greek chorus that seems to find all this death and destruction endlessly amusing. (Or maybe they’re still laughing about that name.)

- Austin AV Club