Member: Baribrotzer (Profile)
(All
Album Reviews by Baribrotzer)
Date: 10/18/2004
Format: CD
(Album)
OK,
I'll say it up front. With of Natural History,
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have done something I would have
sworn was impossible: They’ve made an album as strong as their
live show.
Anybody who has seen them and had that show
knock them over will know how difficult this was. SGM live to
perform, do so far more than most prog bands, and play with an
unusual combination of headlong ferocity and turn-on-a-dime
precision. Full of heavy-metal guitars, madhouse violin,
gravelly or screeching vocals, and boiler-factory percussion,
their music ROCKS like $%&#. However, to some extent it
also depends upon the intensity of their over-the-top stage
act, and neither Grand Opening and Closing, nor the
official bootleg SGM Live managed to translate that
power to record. The new one does.
First, of
Natural History consists of a concept album: The songs,
production, liner notes, and packaging all tie together to
make a statement of radical environmentalism - how Mankind has
come to act as if we own the Earth, how we do not in fact own
it, how disaster looms over us, and how we've brought that
down upon our own heads. The band express this in terms of
their peculiar mythology, some of which derives from the
eccentric history and philosophy of the original Sleepytime
Gorilla Museum, some from the band's home-brewed legend of the
“Donkey-headed Adversary of Humanity”, and some from the
Italian Futurists and the Unabomber – a couple of new
additions to their stew-pot of ideas. (for more about all
this, see Appendix I.) Although they, typically, connect only
a few of the dots, they also present a clear enough outline to
guess at the rest of the picture.
The album's
misanthropic theme, though, might not strike a listener so
much as the way SGM communicate it. They obviously took great
care in sequencing the tracks – this album could serve as a
model for both flow and contrast. But far more than that,
transitions – archival samples, odd special effects, musical
passages, or field-recordings of bird, animal, insect, and
human sounds – tie each tune to the next, cementing the whole
together into a unified work. It really sounds like a single
artistic statement - not a rock opera, but a classic concept
album. In the manner of Sgt. Pepper, of Natural
History doesn't so much tell a story as assemble a picture
out of snapshots taken from different points of view, although
SGM’s come closer to nightmarish staged tableaux than The
Beatles’ hand-tinted postcards. (See Appendix II for a
track-by-track rundown.)
As that would suggest, the
band's harsh, clamorous sound hasn't changed a lot. However,
it has broadened and deepened. Nils’ voice ranges from a
cavernous Johnny Cash bass to a Wetton-like timbre to a
gravelly, demented howl to a surprisingly tender falsetto; his
guitar tone is brawny and aggressive, yet absolutely clear on
the occasional extended chord. Although Carla played down her
violin virtuosity on their earlier output, she doesn't hide it
quite so much here; her singing has strengthened and sounds
more like Sonja Kristina than Dagmar. In the rhythm section,
the “Mr. Big Heavy Beat” vs. ”Clattering Madman” duo approach
of Frank (or Matthias) on drums and Moe! on percussion
remains, as do Dan's simple, rock-solid, and huge-toned bass
lines. And while all this will sound familiar if you've heard
them before, what they do with it will sound a little
different.
The material on of Natural History
has definitely changed direction from Grand Opening and
Closing - more concise, it focuses on tightly written
songs. That might reveal some influence from their friends Uz
Jsme Doma; it also sometimes ends up sounding a bit like
Cardiacs (although I don’t think SGM have ever heard that
band). The earlier album's lengthy, droning explorations of
bizarre textures and extended build-ups still appear, but
either used as the transitions between songs or edited,
defined by sharp-edged harmonic progressions, and built into
those songs’ forms. Only one tune, “Babydoctor,” continues
their earlier, more-deliberate, approach.
Their manner
of mixing styles has also changed. While of Natural
History goes just as much all over the map as its
predecessor, its many idioms seem better melded together,
integrated as different aspects of a single identifiable
sound. The central constituents of this remain heavy metal,
industrial-music, folk-rock, and avant-prog, but now they
rarely appear separately: Even SGM’s prettiest folk-rock has
an underlying Comus-like ugliness; even their angriest
extreme-metal has a musicality beyond the usual rumbling,
croaking explosions of animal rage; even their most
nightmarish industrial-music has a compositional focus and
range expressing far more than pummeling sonics and seething
alienation. For the first time, echoes of punk and jazz also
show up: punk in the terse, urgent, and clear-cut song
structures, jazz in Carla's vocal lines, her wailing,
bent-note performances, and the occasional Mingus-like
minor-major-9th harmonic color. And although SGM draw heavily
from the sound of each of these styles (and from many others
as well), they don't hold themselves to any of the
accompanying esthetics.
On the other hand, the sound of
their progressive-rock side may not appear quite as obviously
as the others, but their musical esthetic comes very much from
that quarter. It provides their dissonant, chromatic harmonic
language, their ferocious meter-changes and cross-rhythms,
their nonstandard song structures, and, most important, their
governing approach of using different styles like mixable
colors in a paint-box, rather than discrete scraps to collage
or sealed compartments to work within. Other industrial acts
seem to think like cutting-edge visual artists - sculpting raw
sound for pure visceral brutality, morphing piled-up textures
into other piled-up textures, and trying for an endless
tension with no release. SGM don't. They may admire such
sound-art greatly and aspire to its single-minded power, but
they can't stop thinking like composers: building music in
terms of melodic development, harmonic progressions, cycles of
tension and release, musical contrasts, and modulations of
key. And in the process, they've set themselves to do
something else nearly impossible: to bring Apollonian
orchestral scope, compositional skill, musicality, and
professionalism to an over-the-top Dionysian musical idiom all
about emotional meltdowns, unpredictable performances, and
flamboyantly dysfunctional lives brought raw and unedited onto
the stage. Without giving up any of its intensity. The result
may sound different from most progressive rock, but it works
in a similar way, sounds musically right rather than
wrong, and has its own type of scorched, desolate,
contorted, volcanic-landscape beauty.
But under that
racketiness lies some traditionally good songwriting. Most of
the tunes have strong, memorable melodies, at some point if
not throughout. And even at their noisiest, they also have a
large helping of hooks – whether the lilting falsetto
nursery-rhyme bridge to “Gunday’s Child”, the twanging
odd-metered guitar riff on “The Donkey-headed…,” the careening
Moog-like violin counter-line for “Freedom Club”, the lurching
rhythm-section of “Bring Back the Apocalypse”, or the
percussive BONGs, CLANGs, and SCREECHes in “Babydoctor”.
Unlike most avant-prog, but very much like the best of
Seventies prog, of Natural History works way better as
pop music than you'd think. A lot of it, in fact, is pretty
damn catchy. Apparently, their label (Mimicry Records) has
large hopes for this album. They have good reason – with it,
SGM have matured into full-on recording artists, as opposed to
a live band who also release CDs. Whether Sleepytime Gorilla
Museum will ever break out of the Oddball Music ghetto is
anybody's guess, but this just might do it for them.
-
John Hagelbarger
MUSICIANS:
Nils Frykdahl: Guitar, vocals,
flute.
Carla Kihlstedt: Violin, vocals, percussion-guitar,
autoharp, and pump organ.
Dan Rathbun: Bass, vocals,
slide-piano log, and cockroach.
Moe! Staiano: Junkyard
percussion and glockenspiel.
Matthias Bossi: (on tracks 3,
5, & 6) Drums, xylophone, and vocals.
Frank Grau: (on
the other tracks) Drums, melodica (on 10 & 11), and band
manager.
Appendix I – SGM’s Mythology
and the Album Concept:
The Original
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum:
As
described in the liner notes to Grand Opening and
Closing, the original Sleepytime Gorilla Museum consisted
of a print shop, an artists’ studio space, and a series of
elaborate Dadaist performance-art pranks perpetuated by those
artists. Although it started in 1916, some of its members
continued to work together until the Fifties, including John
Kane, an eccentric mathematician and misanthropic philosopher.
In the Thirties, Kane published a series of pamphlets
detailing a sort of Theory of De-evolution, in which he
equated human culture and inventions to an emulation of the
“lower” animals. Furthermore, as civilizations became more
advanced, he saw them as copying ever-lower animal life: Tools
and weapons imitate the teeth of pigs and wolves, villages
imitate rodent burrows, and cities imitate social-insect
nests. And the devastation that modern “civilized” man wreaks
upon the environment can compare only with that done by insect
swarms.
The Adversary:
SGM’s Adversary first appeared in
the home-made legend also found in the liner notes to
[Grand Opening and Closing: the tale of a Fisher
King-like divine sacrifice and succession, suddenly
short-circuited by the infant god's refusal to accept his
preordained role, his desecration of the ceremony, and his
transformation into “the Donkey-headed Adversary of Humanity”.
Having aspects of an enraged nature-god, he seems more like a
personification of ecological disaster. The Adversary takes
the side of animals, plants, and the Earth itself, we have
made an implacable enemy of him by our own hubris,
environmental irresponsibility, and self-appointed godhead,
and we will soon begin to suffer the consequences of that.
However, he is the Donkey-headed Adversary of
Humanity, NOT the Goat-headed Adversary of God. The conflict
here is fought at right angles to the one between Good and
Evil: it is not the Cold War for the human soul between Heaven
and Hell, but open battle for the Earth between Man and the
Adversary. And unlike the Devil, we cannot buy the Adversary
off with worship. From his viewpoint, Christianity and its
negative image, Satanism, differ very little, for both give
Man a special preeminence, and neither “thou shalt have
dominion over the Earth,” nor “’do what thou will,’
shall be the whole of the law” encourages much
responsibility for the rest of the world.
Finally, the
Adversary is also an intentionally grotesque and ridiculous
figure. At least in part, the band intend his mythology as a
sort of mockery of Satanism, for SGM tend to meet a number of
Satanists, and often find that they “think they're so much
cooler than Christians, but they're just as dogmatic.” I see a
certain parallel to the Subgenius crowd
here.
The Futurists and the
Unabomber:
Of Natural History
has the subtitle, The Futurists vs. The Unabomber, and
SGM also express the conflict in those terms:
In
pre-WWI Italy, the Futurists were essentially a harmless group
of artistic hipsters who celebrated speed, progress, and
resolute decisiveness, and dismissed endless talk and pasta,
among other things. Sounds ridiculous and inconsequential. But
they had given voice to an undercurrent in popular culture
that led, in ten years, to a jumped-up schoolyard bully with a
big chin running Italy. Still a bit absurd. Ten years after
that, a man who looked like Charlie Chaplin was running
Germany. And suddenly none of it was funny at all.
On
the other hand, the Unabomber was a criminal madman, not at
all harmless, and evil by almost anyone's definition. He
murdered and maimed people, simply to make the world take his
brand of environmentalism seriously. He may have come about as
close as any human being can to taking the Adversary's side.
Yet his anti-technology ranting contained a fair amount of
insight and some truth. And it may yet turn out to be
prophetic.
The Concept:
While the above will give you some
idea of the real and invented source-material SGM used in
making of Natural History, it doesn't tell you what
they mean by it, or how they dealt with it. Most of the songs
articulate the viewpoints of one or another of the individuals
described above; they don't tell a linear story. A few of them
seem more personal – “Babydoctor,” for example, concerns
several people Nils met and how they affected him (he once
explained the lyrics to me. It took him half an hour). Despite
the political edge to their work, they are artists, not
revolutionaries: Rather than denying or ruthlessly eliminating
confusion, they glory in it, in creating work having multiple
interpretations.
Two things do seem clear, though:
they write, play, sing, and perform their material with
absolute conviction; and at the same time they dislike and
distrust ANY kind of dogmatism, including their own. Most of
what they do has a dark, off-center humor. This, I think,
comes partly from a desire to avoid self-righteous
preachiness, partly from a conviction that people who can't
laugh at themselves have lost their perspective and sense of
fairness, and partly from something else: not so much a lack
of commitment, but realizing and admitting just how far that
commitment extends – and doesn't extend. A band of radical
environmentalists who spend three months out of the year
touring hundreds of miles a day in a vehicle getting five
miles per gallon, whose most left-wing member makes a good
living as a partner in a small business, and who espouse a
misanthropic philosophy but also genuinely like people and
firmly believe in always giving their audiences 100% onstage,
need to have a certain appreciation for cognitive dissonance.
Appendix II - The
Tracks:
Droning pump-organ and snoring
open the album, interrupted by the furious bark and growling
of a sleeping dog awakened. Twittering violin harmonics lead
straight into “A Hymn for Heaven's Radio.” This does, in fact,
consist of a hymn - sung in Nils’ theatrical basso and
recounting the myth of the Adversary, as celebrated by a coven
of deluded would-be worshippers.
Accompanied by
glockenspiel, acapella vocal harmonies, and pizzicato violin
arpeggios, it breaks twice for crashing outbursts with
distorted bass from the rest of the band.
The drone,
snarling, and twittering immediately return. Then a guitar
lick coalesces under them and “The Donkey-headed Adversary of
Humanity Opens the Discussion” clatters to life. The album's
most obviously “progressive” track, it combines a relentless
guitar riff, interruptions by abrupt unison triplets, and a
Fred Frith-like Eastern European jig used as a bridge. Its
several sections alternate and vary themselves quickly and
nervously, while gravelly metal vocals bellow of how the
Adversary declares war upon Humanity and angrily rejects
worship.
A couple of growls, a donkey's bray, a short
gap, and “Phthisis” starts. This track features Big-Time
Music-Biz Production by Scott Humphrey, a Big-Time Hollywood
Producer, and it shows - “Phthisis” leaps out of the speakers
in a way unlike anything else on the album. Its first
two-thirds compress the guitar and rhythm-section into one
gruff rhythmic bark and reduce the violin to a special effect,
all to leave sonic room for Carla's King-Kong-sized vocal.
Lyrically, it seems to summarize the Futurist world-view and
also refers to the original S.G.M. The arrangement opens up a
bit on the B section, crowd noise builds, someone bellows in
Italian from a scratchy archival recording (Mussolini?), and
the track ends in more crowd noise.
The crowd noise
continues, and “Bring Back the Apocalypse” slowly emerges out
of it as a sparse rhythm pattern, gains a wobbly
percussion-guitar melody and an overdubbed chorus like drunken
Russian sailors, then segues into a stumbling, hiccupping
groove and a crazed vocal chant. This track seems more like an
elaborate two-part transition than a conventional song, ends
with another scratchy archival recording of Italian ranting
mingled with nonsense words (one of the Futurists?), and fades
into buzzing flies.
From the buzzing, a ghostly
xylophone part appears, and a falsetto chorus begins to sing
of the Unabomber and his vision in “FC: The Freedom Club.” A
small epic, this transforms by degrees into full-on growling,
rivet-gunning extreme-metal, passing through a few brief
spoken lines, hard rock, and straight metal on the way. In
this, it vaguely echoes Opeth, although “FC” has four or five
gears and the Swedes seem to only have two: slow and flat-out.
After repeating that progression of styles, the song ends as
it began.
Birds singing, more insect sounds, and wind
lead into the raging anti-war “Gunday’s Child.” Somewhat
different from the version played at NEARFest, it now has a
staggering funk groove, a jazzy vocal from Carla, a nasty
singsong "nursery-rhyme" bridge, and no longer ends with that
throat-tearing shriek (by the end of last summer's tour,
Carla's speaking voice had come to sound rather like Nils' as
a result of that song).
The insect sounds return along
with violin squeaks. Then a nonstop three-note lick of bass
harmonics surfaces, the violin and a tin whistle shrill out
similar lines, and metallic percussion improvisations bong and
clatter away. Another transitional piece, “The 17-year Cicada”
fades away into chomping noises and pig squeals.
Out of
those, “The Creature” starts with an attack of musical
hiccups, then levels out to droning violin and “Midnight
Cowboy”-like bell parts over a loop of samples. Highly
political and rather heavy-handed, Dan's mostly-spoken vocal
hits too hard and doesn't work as well as the one he did for
SGM Live’s “The Neighborhood” (a ghoulish little story
with an odd, half-familiar resonance). Gradually, the music
gets louder as Dan gets more outraged, abruptly subsides, then
ends as it began.
A taped conversational fragment, in
which a Relaxed Southern Gentleman ruminates upon the theft of
his shirt, provides a bridge to “What Shall We Do Without Us.”
A brief Utopian vision, it starts with Carla's frantically
sawing violin and breathy voice, suddenly explodes into a
full-band development of that idea, then returns to its
beginnings. It finishes with another individual in an equally
relaxed state asserting his authorship of an old jump-rope
rhyme.
“Babydoctor” dates back almost to the release of
Grand Opening and Closing, and its repetition, extended
portions, and slow, inexorable build through many sections
from eerie sparseness to roaring heavy-metal sound very like
something from that album. In sound and structure, it
resembles symph-prog reinterpreted by a death-metal band.
Lyrically, it shows the first crack in the album's
misanthropic theme: that someone outraged by Humanity in
general can still respect and admire individual human beings –
even ones very different from him.
The second relaxed
individual speaks again, then an autoharp strum opens
“Cockroach.” Revealing a second crack in their radical theme,
it admits that even hard-core environmentalism only goes so
far. The comic instrumentation includes an absurd sped-up
melodica as well as that autoharp. ” As unabashedly theatrical
as “Hymn,” it resembles very early Bowie and closes the
circle, at least on a musical level.
Finally, on an
untitled, “hidden” track, more nature sounds fade in, a park
ranger talks about frogs and welcomes the band to his
campground, the snoring with which the album started returns,
and the Adversary brays one last time.
Unfortunately,
“S.P.Q.R.” (AKA “We Are All Romans”) does not appear. Although
a cover, originally written and performed by This Heat, that
song belongs here. Its theme - that many unattractive features
of our civilization originally came from the Romans and that
we haven't gotten all that much better - fits in well with the
Futurists. The band apparently plan to release it on an
upcoming single, but if of Natural History goes into
multiple pressings, they should think about adding it to this
album.
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