If you aren’t still in thrall to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum from their first go-round, then I can only assume you don’t know who they are—and now that they’ve reunited after 13 years, you have the enviable opportunity to see them for the first time. SGM play “rock,” in a certain sense, but their gloriously strange music overflows that meager container. They like to call it “rock against rock,” and its innumerable forms include saw-toothed tangles of electric violin and guitar, eerie avant-garde chamber miniatures, devil-and-angel doubled vocals, thundercloud drums rattling with scrap-metal hailstorms, and soaring melodies of garment-rending beauty rendered fractal by mosaics of time signatures. In their persons, the impression they create is both playful and sinister: part fae folk, part Mad Max homesteaders, part far-future priests of an occult posthuman religion.
The band named their brand-new fourth album Sleepytime Gorilla Museum of the Last Human Being (Avant Night), and from the beginning their lyrics have shown a baffled fascination with our civilizational death wish. (To quote a track from 2004: “Mankind is a plague / Breathing hell into every corner of the rotting earth.”) We’ve made a world that’s inhospitable even to ourselves, and SGM suspect that human extinction might be the best thing for it. At the same time, they’ve devoted themselves to the sort of absurd beauty that only humans (as far as we know) have ever produced. Thus divided against itself, SGM’s music shrieks at the heavens, coos soothing words into its own ear, and chants to gods yet to be imagined.
This unreconcilable tension often manifests itself in exultant inversions of order: “Let the corpse hatch,” SGM proclaim in the new “El Evil.” “Let the dog sing.” The song “Salamander in Two Worlds” describes a creature “Strong from poison / Alive in the arms of death.” The band’s attempts to grapple with apparent impossibility sometimes seem to actually create the convolutions in their maniacally detailed, toweringly theatrical songs.
Last year, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum reunited with the same lineup they’d evolved into at the time of their hiatus in 2011: guitarist and flutist Nils Frykdahl, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, bassist Dan Rathbun, drummer Matthias Bossi, and utility player Michael Mellender. Everybody sings, most prominently Frykdahl and Kihlstedt. The band’s bewildering armamentarium, still intact from their initial run, also includes bass harmonica, trumpet, nyckelharpa, Marxophone, and Rathbun’s homemade Slide-Piano Log, Electric Pancreas, and Pedal-Action Wiggler.
In a June 2023 video interview, Frykdahl explained that when the band formed in Oakland in 1999, they wanted to combine the energy of rock and metal with the rigor of 20th-century classical music—and Kihlstedt underlined the point by showing off a signed portrait of Béla Bartók handed down from her great-aunt. SGM began most of the songs on Last Human Being in 2010, though they recorded “S.P.Q.R.” (a cover of This Heat) in 2004. “The Gift,” “Silverfish,” and “Hush, Hush” arose post-hiatus from other active groups in the Sleepytime ecosystem: Free Salamander Exhibit (with Frykdahl, Rathbun, Mellender, and founding SGM drummer David Shamrock) and Kihlstedt and Bossi’s Rabbit Rabbit Radio. (Speaking of the Sleepytime ecosystem, I’d also encourage you to look up Charming Hostess, Faun Fables, Idiot Flesh, Book of Knots, and Tin Hat. Just for starters.)
These days Kihlstedt, Bossi, and their two kids live in Cape Cod; Frykdahl and Rathbun have children too, but they’ve stayed in California. Most of the Sleepytime progeny will join the band on tour, making this a family vacation of extraordinary magnitude.
“The last human being” began occurring as a subject of SGM’s stage show in 2009, sometimes merely discussed but sometimes also physically embodied by dancer Shinichi Iova-Koga, displayed in a cage. A longtime SGM collaborator and founder of the InkBoat troupe, Iova-Koga also plays the last human in the short film accompanying the new album.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum of the Last Human Being is available on vinyl and CD as well as digitally.
“The new record and the film took their inspiration from the story of Ishi,” says Frykdahl. The last known member of the Native Yahi people and the sole speaker of his language, Ishi walked out of the California foothills in 1911 and spent his final years as a subject of anthropological inquiry. Both SGM projects, by positing a “last human being,” imagine that our extinction has in effect already happened—and thus slyly suggest that whatever we are now is no longer human. “The extinction of human culture, in various forms, has been going on for a long time,” Frykdahl says. “There have been many, many ends of the world.”
The songs that foreground the last human being often toy with comical circus music, as though mocking our impulse to study this “ape” that we can’t see is our own lost selves. On the track “Save It!,” SGM lead us closer to this conclusion: “It knows the dance you can’t dance,” they plead. “It thinks the thought you can’t think.”
If any band can teach you a dance you can’t dance, it’s Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Have I forgotten to talk about how much fun they are? The joy in this music may be desperately beating against a dark current, but it’s still joy—and SGM’s live sets are thrilling, funny, and inspiring. This is their first tour since they started working together again, and I have no idea if we’ll see another. Is it really the end this time? Who can know. The final line of Last Human Being, in “Old Grey Heron,” is Rathbun’s heartbreaking farewell to his father: “We love you, please, stay with us one more day.” So let’s all come out to this show like we aren’t promised tomorrow.
Tonight’s openers include venerable prog-rock pranksters Cheer-Accident, former tourmates of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. “Easily one of our favorite American groups since our first shocking encounter with them in Kansas City, sharing a bill at the Hurricane,” says Frykdahl. “As far as band rivalries go, we really hope it’s going to be a battle to the finish in Chicago. May the best band rise to meet the following day.”
Last month Cheer-Accident took their latest left turn in a long, circuitous route that seems to consist of nothing but left turns: they released their long-threatened “easy listening” record, Vacate (Cuneiform). How many years has it been incubating? Guitarist Phil Bonnet, who died in 1999, cowrote three of its songs. These odd, wistful tunes nod to the smooth 60s with occasional Herb Alpert–style horn charts, but like anything else on a Cheer-Accident album, that slick brass is liable to get bulldozed by irruptions of the band’s straight-faced silliness. This is “easy listening” mostly in that it favors gentle tempos and conventional meters and goes light on the drums—you’d never mistake it for anybody but Cheer-Accident.
“Thank you for (easily) listening,” Thymme Jones writes on the Cheer-Accident Bandcamp page.
Tonight the band will bring the octet lineup they’ve been using for most of the past two years, anchored by founder, drummer, and vocalist Thymme Jones, longtime guitarist Jeff Libersher, and bassist Alex Perkolup. (They’ll also feature at least four guest players.) Every Cheer-Accident set is an unrepeatable collection of temporally bound idiosyncrasies, and for this one Jones says they’ve got “a real decades-expanding potpourri, including songs that have not yet been recorded (and are about to be, at Electrical Audio). Nothing from the new one, though. Promise!”
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum Dead Rider and Cheer-Accident open. Wed 3/13, 6:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $30, $25 in advance, all ages
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