Goodness gracious. The upward trend that’s been going since September of last year continued in February, with 14,968 page views. I was holding my breath last night to see if we’d get over 15,000, but since 14,000 was my goal for the month — and it seemed an unrealistic one at that, since it was a shorter month — I was thrilled to see the numbers land where they did. 14,968. Wow.

There were a lot of small changes put in effect over the last month, from the advertising thing to the line spacing and other tiny tweaks, but if anyone’s objected, I haven’t heard about it. Overall, I look at The Obelisk today and think of where it was a year ago and can’t believe how it’s evolved and level of interest that it’s been given. Unreal. Just imagine where we’ll be a year from now.

A couple quick notes to run down:

Merch: The shirt design that I thought was coming hadn’t begun yet, so it’s going to be a while more. Typical stoner rock miscommunication. For me, that’s the stuff of life at this point. But anyway, we should be back on track now and getting things moving. Yes, the shirt will feature a wizard fighting a grizzly bear. No, I have no idea what that will look like yet.

Podcasting: The February podcast (“An Ode to Fuzz”) did considerably worse than its predecessor in terms of downloads and all that. I don’t have a way to track streaming activity, so I can only get a sense through comments and download numbers (which is why I’m always asking for comments on the podcasts). I’ll be keeping an eye on the March one — in my opinion, the best of the bunch — and deciding whether it’s worth my time to continue podcasting based on that and probably next month’s.

Roadburn: After much back and forth with The Patient Mrs., she finally got drunk enough to buy me a plane ticket to The Netherlands, which means I’ll once again be covering the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg. Goatsnake, Los Natas, Garcia Plays Kyuss, YOB (twice), House of Broken Promises, Samsara Blues Experiment and about a million more. I am stoked beyond belief, and all the more so, because the kind folks behind the festival have asked me to do my reporting for their very own blog in addition to The Obelisk. Tickets are sold out, but if you’re going, I’d love to meet you there. I’ll be the fat American dude with the beard. Oh yeah, and I’ll have a black t-shirt on.

Review and interview-wise, there’s a lot of great stuff coming up. Later today I’ll be knee-deep in some surprisingly killer space rock from Virginia, but hopefully in the next week or so albums from Johnny Cash, Demontage and Lair of the Minotaur will also be tackled. Maybe I’ll even get to that High on Fire record one of these days. I’ll be introducing you to my favorite unsigned band in the country, and (again, hopefully) nailing down interviews with The Wounded Kings, Sasquatch, The Brought Low, Phased, Asteroid (just waiting on them to return the email questions), Cathedral and maybe even a certain legendary Maryland doomer known as much for his lifestyle off-stage as for his James Brown impression on it. All tentative (well, the reviews are pretty much a lock), but that’s just a sampling of why it’s worth sticking around for March.

In fact, why doesn’t everyone just stay here and click refresh every seven seconds or so? You’re bound to run into something awesome sooner or later.

I’ll cut it here and just say thanks again for helping make this site what it is. I’m looking forward to seeing where we go next.

Covered in fuzz,
JJ Koczan
Hock Ptooey Taskmaster

…I know that’s pretty much the lamest Sabbath song ever, but at least it’s appropriate. Observant attendees will note a couple changes around here from over the weekend, which were alluded to in the anniversary update. Here’s a quick rundown:

First: The ads. Yeah, they’re over there. They exist. I tried to make them as minimally invasive as possible, and I hope it worked. A big thank you to Patrick Slevin of The Aquarian Weekly for helping me do what I know there’s no way I would have been able to accomplish on my own in putting that all together.

Second: The line-spacing in between lines of text was widened just a bit. Hopefully this makes The Obelisk look a little less compressed and more readable. If that’s not the case, please let me know. More likely, I’m the only person who’s ever thought about it one way or the other.

Third: The category headings in the sidebar are bigger, and there’s a “What People Dig” heading. That just shows the most popular posts people have been viewing. The bigger headings hopefully make it easier to navigate around here. Thanks again to Slevin for that.

Fourth: The contact page has a new email form which should make it more efficient for anyone who wants to get in touch. The future is now. Actually, the future is like five years ago, but it takes me a while to catch up. Why not drop me an email and tell me how behind the times I am?

Of course, you can always leave a comment to that effect too. I read those pretty regularly.

Thanks for your patience and for reading. Here’s a live Monster Magnet video of them doing “Zodiac Lung” and “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” from 1995, just because:

Well, it’s been a year now since I launched The Obelisk. I’ve been wracking my brain for something to say other than “thanks” for the whole weekend and continue to come up empty, so I’ll stick with that. Thanks.

January 2010 was our best month yet, with 13,574 hits in 31 days. Pretty powerful stuff, and the upward trend continues to astound me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If you missed the January podcast, please feel free to check it out here, and as I seem to say every month, there’s more great stuff to come, so stick around. On the immediate docket are interviews with Floor, Dead Meadow, Droids Attack, Asteroid and, coming later today, Saint Vitus. So yeah, good things are happening.

I had no idea last year when I began putting this site together that it would be received the way it has, and while I know it’s far from the end-all-be-all of internet popularity, the consistent and loyal readership/commentship/etc. has helped me really understand the point in doing all this in the first place. It was a crazy year, but I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be, doing what I should be, and for ending up in such a position I feel incredibly lucky.

I’ve alluded to changes down the pike, and I feel like it’s time to discuss a few of them briefly, just so everything’s in the open going forward:

Advertising: I’ve signed up for Google AdSense, and as soon as I can get the code up and integrate it with Analytics, there will be ads on this site. That is the way it has to be if I’m to continue the kind of posting I’ve been doing. Please know that probably more money than I’ll ever make from ads will be spent on CDs for review and Buried Treasure purposes, and if you find the ads intrusive, understand that I’ve tried to make them as minimally so as possible. As for banner ads and things like that, I’m not there yet.

Podcasting: Will now be a regular, monthly thing as best as possible. If I slip one month, don’t hold it against me, but to the best of my abilities, there should be a new one right around the middle of each month. We’ll see how it goes.

Merch: I have a t-shirt design coming, and I don’t want to give too much away, but it might just feature a wizard fighting a grizzly bear. More on that soon.

Graphics: One of the things I like best about this site is that the look of it isn’t intrusive and reading the pages doesn’t give me a headache. Keeping that in mind there are small improvements design-wise I’m going to see if I can’t pull together. I’m not a graphic artist by any stretch, but I’m not going for anything too fancy anyway. If something looks slightly tweaked, don’t be surprised.

Suggestions: I know I’ve said this before, but I really want to make it clear. If there’s something you want to see that I’m not doing (and that it makes any sense for me to do), please let me know at jj (atsign) theobelisk (dot) net.

That’s all I can think of in the immediate, but if there’s anything else, I’ll let you know. Thank you again for your support of The Obelisk in its first year. I hope this note finds you well, and that whatever you’re doing, you’re enjoying it as much as I’m enjoying this. If you run into me at the bar, next round’s on me.

In riffs,
JJ Koczan
Humble Pie Taskmaster

I don’t want to take too much time here, but just a quick thanks to everyone who’s checking out the site lately. We broke 620 hits for the day yesterday (Jan. 13), and unless there was some trackback Yahoo didn’t tell me about, it was just business as usual. It would be funny if the increase in traffic was due to the word “porn” featuring so extensively in that Buried Treasure post, but in any case, thank you so much for stopping in and reading. It means more than I can say.

On a side note, this is also post #700. So for anyone keeping count, there you go. Thanks again.

I couldn’t have planned it better. Not only did we nearly top 11,000 hits for December when I didn’t even think we’d be able to maintain the 10k+, but as it turns out, this is also Post #666: The Post of the Beast! Exciting times indeed.

Happy New Year to everyone seeing this. As I said previously, 2010 is going to bring some changes around here, but since we’re a mere month away from the first anniversary of my starting this site, I’m going to hold off discussing them for the moment. Oh, restraint: thou bastard. If anyone has something they’d like to see on here, a review for their band, some glaring categorical error corrected, etc., my email’s always open: jj (atsign) theobelisk (dot) net

In the meantime, as always, thanks for reading and coming back. Extra thanks to all those leaving comments lately — and that goes double for everyone who checked out the podcast. The holidays are over, so we’re more or less back to normal around here, and I have no idea what that means. Here’s to finding out together.

Thanks again, and all the best in 2010,
JJ Koczan
H.P. Taskmaster

After October’s Blabbermouth-fueled inflation, I didn’t dream we’d get to 10,000 hits again for at least a couple months of slow growth, but not only did we do it, but we surpassed both last month’s number and my expectations, even with the dip last week saw because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Thank you so much for reading and coming back for more.

Since June, this site has had over 40,000 views, half of them, obviously, coming in the last two months. That brings with it some serious implications:

First, there are a lot of new attendees out there. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. I hope you dig this site and if there’s anything I can do for you or you think could be better, please leave a comment or email me at jj (atsign) theobelisk (dot) net.

Second, the regulars keep coming back. Thank you most of all. Your continued support is genuinely appreciated and I’ve greatly enjoyed seeing the occasional discussion in the comments of the reviews and whatnot. The thought that there could be an exchange of ideas based on the writing I’m doing here is humbling and I mean that with the utmost sincerity.

December and January is when the music industry typically shuts down, and though I’m still debating whether or not I’ll take a week off toward the end of this month, you can pretty much trust that one way or another, The Obelisk will be here. I’m also thinking of some new elements for 2010, and if anyone has ideas to throw in, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks again,
JJ Koczan
H.P. Taskmaster

Yesterday was a combined travel/class day, so if you stopped by and were disappointed or surprised at the lack of updates, I just wasn’t around. There’s a whole world out there, sometimes even pajama-clad stoner rock bloggers have to go be in it. The real bummer was that I was so excited to share the numbers from October and didn’t get the chance to until now:

10,032

Much of that is owed to the fact that Blabbermouth picked up the Katatonia interview, and I thank Borivoj Krgin for the support. Every time I checked the number of hits, I was amazed that many people were looking at the site, and though we just made it over, the 10,000 mark is a huge milestone for a single month of hits.

It’s been nine months now I’ve been running this site, and, admittedly, it’s taken up a lot of my time. It’s getting to the point now where I talk about it to The Patient Mrs. and she just rolls her eyes because, by her view, what I’m putting in is much less than what I’m getting out. Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. The solution to that, I think, is advertising, which I loathe the thought of having on The Obelisk. I kiss enough label ass as it is, and working with smaller imprints, I’d almost feel bad asking them for money, especially if they’re already donating free product to the cause. On the other hand, a site like MetalSucks — who I admire and are a great source of inspiration for what I do here — have benefited greatly from the legitimacy and place in the industry that advertising brings. But man, I fucking hate the thought of selling ads.

When and if it’s going to happen, you’ll be sufficiently warned first. I know dick all about coding and the reorganization that putting ads on this site would take, so if I decide to go that route, it probably wouldn’t be until winter break, when most of the industry is shut down anyway. We’ll see. Until then, The Patient Mrs. will continue to roll her eyes. Thank you, as ever, for reading. Your continued support is astounding. Really. Here’s to the next 10,000.

If you’d asked me way back in February when I was just starting this site, “Hey buddy, do you think you’ll make it to 500 posts?” I’d have said, “Yeah, probably.” Well, now here we are.

In all seriousness, thank you so much for your support, reading and comments these last eight-plus months. As I seem to say every time I hit one of these milestones: more to come.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used “Sabbra Cadabra” as a means for celebration. Five months ago to the day, it went up to honor The Obelisk’s 200th post. So you can say I’m repeating myself if you want, but dammit, it’s Black Sabbath. Get off your hypercritical high horse and rock the fuck out. It’s the best riff ever. The more times it appears on this site, the better the site is.

I’ve been avoiding saying it, but today, Oct. 19, is my birthday. There. It’s out now. Like all holidays, I think birthdays are pretty arbitrary and I’m not really into partying or celebrating them or anything like that, but hell, it’s an excuse to post “Sabbra Cadabra” again, so I’ll take it.

This version, appropriately, comes recorded live from Asbury Park, NJ, in 1975. It’s a bootleg called Accidental Overdose that Candlemass bassist Leif Edling and I discussed when I interviewed him about his solo record. One listen and you’ll know why it’s a worthy topic of conversation.

Well, everything’s back that’s coming back after the big site crash. No more stuff to be “RECOVERED.” Onward to the future. Listen to Akimbo and celebrate with me in riffy glory.

In whatever fancy browser you use, go type the words “The Obelisk” into Google and look at the first entry. That’s right, you’re right back here. Number one. I feel like I finally accomplished something in my life.

To celebrate, I’m thinking of maybe getting a new logo. How about this one?

If you read this page regularly, thanks. If you put any stock in the opinions here presented, thanks even more. I don’t delude myself into thinking there’s some grand impact being made, but if you check out a CD or download something or go to someone’s MySpace because you saw the name or the link here, I think that’s fucking awesome and appreciate it more than I can say. Once again, here’s my list of the top five albums so far this year:

1. Los Natas, Nuevo Orden de la Libertad
2. Wino, Punctuated Equilibrium
3. Truckfighters, Mania
4. Heaven and Hell, The Devil You Know
5. Goblin Cock, Come with Me if You Want to Live

By way of honorable mention, I’ll point out Brothers of the Sonic Cloth’s 2009 demo and Candlemass‘ Death Magic Doom. There are others. Lots of them.

But the time for looking back is over, at least for now. The rest of this year will bring new records from Yob, Clutch and (hopefully) Masters of Reality, and a shit ton more, so there’s still plenty to look forward to and enjoy when the release dates come. I’ll do my best to keep up with it all, and if you stumble back this way at some point along the line, then thanks again.

It got mixed reviews and, like its predecessor, flew under the radar of most heads, but Goblin Cock’s Come with Me if You Want to Live — released in February — has some of the coolest songs I’ve heard in the last six months. What’s best about it is there is no filler. Goblin Cock packs eight minutes’ worth of doom into a three minute song and makes it catchy to boot. Plus, there’s practically nothing serious about it, but it’s not irono-douchebaggery either. The album hits just the right balance of humor and killer riffs.

The hooded and masked project of Pinback/The Ladies/Optiganally Yours (and solo) singer/guitarist Rob Crow, Goblin Cock strikes a rarely achieved balance of dooming out and having fun that appeals, admittedly, to the skinny-pantsed, thick-rimmed post-grad set (Crow’s pedigree is also a factor), but quality songwriting and a lack of chic posturing makes Come with Me if You Want to Live more than just forgettable hipster metal pablum. As I said in my live review of their show in NYC a while back, the thing about hipster metal is that people make money playing it. One listen and you know there’s no way Goblin Cock are bringing in the cash.

If you haven’t yet, give the record a shot. For your ease in doing so, here’s “Ode to Billy Jack,” one of my favorites from Come with Me if You Want to Live.

Come the end of 2009 there’s going to be all kinds of lists and best-ofs. Not just here, everywhere. All the more since it’s the end of a decade. The 10 Best Dumps I Took in the 2000s, and so forth. Not that this is any less self-inflating than that, but at least I’m willing to say that the top five of the first half of 2009 (TFFH09) list I’ll be unfolding over the next couple days is totally subjective and ultimately meaningless. That said, I hope you dig it.

Here it is, big number two zero zero. The weather is gorgeous this afternoon in the valley and I’m still all hopped up on pain meds from having my wisdom teeth out yesterday, but I did manage to get to 200 today anyhow. My face is swollen and it hurts like hell, but whatever. Shit happens. Often. And worse than this. At least it’s not my fucking cornea.

Stick around because in the next 100 posts there will be much awesomeness. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this site even half as much as I have thus far.

Celebratory Sabra Cadabra!

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