Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Come again?

July 9, 11:55 PMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

A band with the name Sleepytime Gorilla Museum has some 'splainin' to do. Not that I've ever looked too deeply into monikers like Moby Grape or the String Cheese Incident, but Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, that just seems to signify something. And when you try to parse language, what do you get?

There's an evocation of the children's hour and sweet dreams butted up against a giant ape. King Kong, maybe. And then, what to make of the repository of historical artifacts? As a band, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (SGM from here on out), is a Bay Area rock quintet that brings together elements of prog, heavy metal, goth, deep folk and avant-garde experimentation and mixes them until something new, exhilarating and more than a little scary emerges.

On the band's fourth album, In Glorious Times (released last year by The End Records), the musicians—guitarist Nils Frykdahl (Idiot Flesh, Faun Fables), bassist/producer Dan Rathbun (Idiot Flesh, Ink Boat), violinist Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat, Charming Hostess, 2 Foot Yard), percussionist Michael Mellender and drummer Matthias Bossi—raise a collective howl (they all sing, scream and bellow) against social and political evils and the sublime reality of birth and death. It's a tortuous admixture that recalls King Crimson, Yes, Henry Cow, the Mothers of Invention, Black Sabbath, Einstürzende Neubauten, Tom Waits and more, augmented sonically with piano, glockenspiel, trumpet, percussion-guitar, nyckelharpa and more, and in live shows with theatrical props and costuming.

In 2002, Frykdahl called the SGM sound "maximalism in complexity" and "utterly simple, visceral music," and Rathbun said, "We're trying to prove that music geeks can make emotional music"; Kihlstedt explained earlier this year that "this record [In Glorious Times] is more emotionally direct and more personal than the others" largely because it was recorded in the wake of the December 2005 death of Frykdahl's brother, Per. And, she added, "if you dig to what's underneath, even the humor is very serious."

And the name? In the first half of the 20th century, there was a "real" Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, operated by a small group of Dadaists and Futurists and cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the "World's Most Closed Public Institution." As a "museum of the future ... anti-artifact, non-historical and closed," it existed for 34 years but was open for only 47 days. I guess that means come and get it while you can.