SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM - In Glorious Times

American supergroup Sleepytime Gorilla Museum arrive at their third studio effort carrying the weight of cult band status among fans of the "deviant" fringes of progressive and metal. A many-headed hydra, the group was born from the meeting of the schizoid industrial/sludge of Idiot Flesh, the dark and magical folk of Faun Fables, the indie-prog of Cheer-Accident, and the dissonant progressive of Thinking Plague (though the list of related bands could go on much longer).

It's precisely the latter who stand as the guiding spirits whose disturbing trajectories echo through many of the album's most successful tracks. The distinction needs to be made, because unfortunately "In Glorious Times" doesn't quite live up to the band's two previous masterpieces, partly due to a cumbersome opening track, given over to symphonic excesses that would look out of place even on a Muse or Queen record. The rest of the album is decidedly better, pummeling Eastern European rhythms with guitar slashes somewhere between Melvins, Meshuggah and Fear Factory. Singer Carla Kihlstedt's voice is a Jekyll/Hyde monster: she lets her ecstatic aura hover over the songs before morphing into a paranoid growl, often joined by possessed, haunting choruses.

As on previous albums, all the music plays on the contrast between heavenly ecstasy and demonic brutality, but however sharply executed, some tracks lack the "impossible" melodic immediacy that made "Of Natural History" and "Grand Opening and Closing" so surprising and memorable. The oblique, atonal lines remain abstruse and cerebral, and the grandiloquence of many sections fails to heighten their intensity, ending up instead making at least a third of the tracks feel cold and overly pompous.

There's still plenty to take comfort in, like the formidable trio of "Formicary"/"Angle of Response"/"Ossuary": a sort of nursery rhyme violated in a vicious Crimson-esque sauce worthy of Today is the Day, a horror carousel spinning to the beat of Bulgarian dances, an Eastern-tinged nightmare made of psychotic scene changes.

It's unclear whether this is a somewhat slapdash record, trying to save itself at the last minute by papering over a lack of strong melodic ideas with a bit more pomp, or whether the band simply got carried away and, in the best progressive tradition, ended up overdoing it.

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22/06/2007