Violinist Carla Kihlstedt is best known for her work in the elegant Tin Hat Trio, and guitarist Nils Frykdahl plays with underground folkie Dawn McCarthy in Faun Fables, but Frykdahl and bassist Dan Rathbun were also part of the deranged prog troupe Idiot Flesh, and all three contributed to the Balkan klezmer-punk version of Charming Hostess. So, perhaps the immediacy of this LP can become tempered over time with a curiosity of what Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is rambling on about.Ģ.This Bay Area avant-garde collective is a splendid and horrifying chimera, stitched together from pieces of animals that would probably eat each other in the wild. Sound effects and segues are implemented in a highly intuitive way, much like on a Trail of Dead album. I'm sure there is some coherence to the lyrics running steadily through this release, but it plays second fiddle to the dizzyingly busy orchestral feats taking place. The discernible lyrics are incredibly silly at times ( "Let us dream now, the impossible dream of a math professor"), but I suppose Metal music can get away with all kinds of hokeyness, since its twenty-some-year history is filled with "Stonehenge"-type pretentiousness. The field recordings on display are some of the most curious examples of this practice since Lift yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. "Babydoctor" approaches a Birthday Party kind of bedlam, but only after eight minutes of the SGM at their most elegant and subdued.Įach of these eleven tracks take enough twists and turns as to make you forget any moments that make you narrow your eyes.
And, without fail, this album provides all this and much more. While Crime & The City Solution actually had Birthday Party members in its ranks, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are part of the trend begun by Birthday Party: that of eloquently grim theatricality applied to the raw majesty of loud, heavy rock.
Except that both the bands can be linked to The Birthday Party. But, according to the internet, the two groups are completely unrelated. It's one of those things where the similarities are so uncanny that you think that there has to be some direct correlation. Nonetheless, when the bass voiced singer intones "I Am the Adversary, and must remain the Adversary." I am transported immediately to The Crime & City Solution's "The Adversary" from the Until The End of the World soundtrack. There's a moment at the end of "A Hymn to the Morning Star" that would smack of mimicry if the influence weren't so esoteric. Some of the same barky, Korn type of vocals are used, but they do not always crescendo in the expected ways. A more modern comparison would be System of a Down (bells and whistles threaten to overtake the nu-metal onslaught), but Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is infinitely more complicated. This is prog rock for the Marilyn Manson set (what's left of it). They're the kind of high concept heavy metal group, with a depth of orchestration usually reserved for opera. The theme speaks to a sort of new bible apocalypse, where the pages write themselves and anarchy achieves an accidental grace period. There are moments of great focus and thematic sweep. The first glaring difference might be that this band is considerably less ADD afflicted. Bungle? Well here's something as frenetic, disjointed, and at times heavy as that band.
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