CD Review: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - ... Of Natural History

Do you think the first culinary mavens to eat a dish prepared by a chef wielding a syringe and a foamer enjoyed it? Say it was duck breast injected with concentrated muskmelon nectar and then pan-seared and steamed over black tea and truffles and sauced with a foam consisting of lingonberry juice, lobster roe, bacon fat and lemongrass. Do you think the hardcore foodies who tasted this theoretical trainwreck of taste, texure, and cutting-edge technique really dug it for what it was, or just tripped out on the novelty?

I sort of suspect the latter. I am a big fan of "difficult" music (meaning everything from experimental noise rock to the mathematical compositions of Webern and Subotnick), but I do have to ask sometimes whether a particular example is more pretentious than good. Even leaving aside obvious rock-era eff-yous as Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" and the famous lost Van Morrison Contractual Fulfillment album, how many owners of legitimately musical yet hard to listen to albums by the Boredoms, Big Black, Captain Beefheart and Cecil Taylor give them a spin very often?

Oh, I know, some people really really can't get enough of Steve Albini or skronky free jazz, but on the whole... how does one tell Shinola from the other stuff? How do you distinguish "weird but kinda good" from "weird for the sake of weird?" Sometimes, sophisticate that I am, I feel like the Original Rube standing on a tiled floor in an art gallery asking passers-by about that Duchamp piece, "am I supposed to admire this, or am I supposed to pee in it?"

I raise this question thanks to the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Consisting of five Bay Area musicians who, all veterans of various avant-garde projects, the Museum present themselves as the travelling roadshow for the fictitious institution in question (no humans allowed!), a group of musicians "unified in [their] various crafts by the simplicity of their opposition to rock music." Their presskit and general presentation is strongly reminiscent of the anarcho-dada absurdist smartassery of Semiotext[e], the Church of the Subgenius, and of the original Dada and Surrealist movements. This is a dangerous road to travel: Dada and Surrealism proved that absurdism and randomness are a neat tricks once and once only, and only a few individuals have the patience and mental fortitude to hang on through the mass of random fish and sludgehammers to find their own faces in the wallpaper. (What?)

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

Visit John Owen's author page — John Owen's Blog