Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – of the Last Human Being (Avant Nigh) – It hops (or even hopes) like a dog, it barks like a frog and it likes to be touched so we’re told. We must know more, oh that’s a good bit! There are hundreds of oh-that’s-a-good-bit bits.  You could get punch drunk with all the good bits, they are punches that Sleepytime are dealing out, almost like going fifteen rounds with it all. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are back, back to give our children the gift that keeps on giving, the children will never have know a world without this band, a world without this this shining gift that we’ve missed for the last dozen or so years..  

This gift is not like other gifts, their This Heat cover is a particularly special gift and there goes another bit that sounds like Cardiacs, although theirs is a very American world, a parallel world and leave the gift at the door and leave your home while the sun still shines and all the world revolves around your mind, coming through, coming through, let the bells ring. Really they’re nothing like Cardiacs, they are wonderfully alike in a very different way though

“After thirteen years of hibernation, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the most gloriously uncategorisable American band in existence, has emerged from stasis to proudly announce the imminent release of their fourth studio album, of the Last Human Being. The album marks the first release on Avant Nigh – a new imprint headed by Nick Ohler and facilitated by Joyful Noise Recordings”.

“Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, comprised of multi-instrumentalists and rotating vocalists Nils Frykdahl, Carla Kihlstedt, Michael “Iago” Mellender, Matthias Bossi, and Dan Rathbun, play an arsenal of instruments ranging from the somewhat standard (drums, electric guitars, bass, electric violin) to the rare (bass harmonica, nyckelharpa, marxophone) to the homemade (Slide-Piano Log, Electric Pancreas, Pedal-Action Wiggler). The group has consistently evaded easy categorization, garnering accolades from across the aisles of contemporary classical music, prog rock, industrial music, metal, avant-garde improv, and more. Their music, inturns bashing and bucolic, enveloping and unsettling, tends towards long-form epics interspersed with mysterious field recordings”.

Songs other don’t dare sing, hide and seek, finders, keepers, losers, weepers, this is some kind of film soundtrack, they’ve made some kind of film, they always sound like a film. Sleepytime have always been just a little bit different,  hang on, what’ s this, is this still them? Save It, has gone off (and things), it came form somewhere we don’t understand, it came to help us dance, it knows we can’t, save it, some kind of operatic Devo and then there’s the last days, standing still and back to that slightly bombastic thing they do, that more familiar thing, that more is more thing – they never ever over cook it though, it never feels like too much, never cluttered, never too many ingredients, every bit important, always lean, healthy, shipshape and and all over the place in just the right way. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum always they always know where they’re going, right now they’re almost thrashing (like Cardiacs almost did) 

Old Grey Heron is gorgeous, well the start of it is until we get to the bit where he’s heading for extinction, there’s a lot of Tim Burton strangeness to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum,  and they are a most American band however rose-coloured their songs get. All musical boxes and spinning top dancers and Victorian circus rides and marvellous mechanical mouse organs and maybe more Wes Anderson that Tim Burton and this a grand return, massive, majestic, coming through, coming through, make way, let the bells ring, coming through, coming through…

It hops (or even hopes) like a dog, it barks like a frog and it likes to be touched so we’re told. We must know more and they have no horns and they have no tails and they don’t even know of our existence and you really do need to know of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s existence 

“As this slow-rolling planetwide Anthropocene Extinction event deepens, Sleepy- time’s work has only grown more resonant, more prescient,” offers Meredith Yayanos, symposiarch and secretary of the Museum’s long standing social math club, the John Kane Society. “What better time for them to Bring Back the Apocalypse than right now,with a new full-length record that integrates the past and the future?”

Most of these recordings were started at Polymorph in Oakland, CA in 2010-11. Additional overdubs in the intervening years were done at Polymorph and in home studios across the land. S.P.Q.R. was entirely recorded and mixed at Polymorph in 2004 and previously released as a 7” on Dephine Knormal Musik.  “Hush, Hush” and “El Evil” were recorded at Polymorph and home studios in 2023″.

This is a glorious return, More coherent maybe, an album that really holds together in a way that previous album might not quite have done, a complex revivification indeed, properly adventurous, a challenge as much to themselves as us, properly progressive prog that never feels safe enough to place in any lazy pigeonhole, just proper proper, a film for your ears, a film for your hearts and minds, welcome back Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, we missed you.  (sw)

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Previous Organ covage – the first time was back in 2002.