In Glorious Times

Album review

In Glorious Times' second song, "Helpless Corpses Enactment," is either straight-ahead death metal, complete with Cookie Monster growls, or an utterly straight-faced parody of same; the fact that it's well-nigh impossible to tell one way or the other pretty much sums up Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. The Oakland quintet's fourth studio album maintains all the oddball humor, technical complexity, jarring dissonance and mindbending dynamic shifts of their previous albums, not to mention their proud inability to sound like the same band from one song to the next. For example, the song directly following the aforementioned slab of death metal is the slightly pompous "Puppet Show," with passages that come close to actually quoting from familiar parts of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, and straight after that, "Formicary" is almost a pop song and "Angle of Repose," sung by violinist Carla Kihlstedt, sounds like it could be an outtake from Björk's Volta. That head-snapping eclecticism is the band's stock in trade, alongside the King Crimson-like blend of metallic aggression, artsy dissonance and flashy chops that's the throughline for all these disparate styles. So basically, those who liked Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's previous albums will love In Glorious Times, which may well be the band's most diverse and accomplished set so far, but those who prefer their bands to sound at all musically consistent will likely be annoyed.

© Stewart Mason /TiVo