Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and experience the genuine, bona fide, certified humbug hullabaloo of the one and only Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. No siree, not even the legendary P.T. Barnum himself could've conceived such a clamorous concoction of sinister industrial noise, death rock, and portending lyrics offered by this quintet of avant-garde art rockers clad in the hottest in Victorian unmentionables. It's theater of the absurd straight from the sanitarium, inspired (in part) by the inane writings of one John Kane, a turn-of-the-20th-century futurist and mathematician. Folks, if your ears ail from the usual brand of musical snake oil, the pulsating prog-heavy and operatic metal generated by guitarist/front man Nils Frykdahl and bassist Dan Rathbun is guaran-damn-teed to clear out your cochlea. Rathbun also plays a series of homemade fantabulous contraptions -- like the "slide piano log" -- while percussionist Moe! Staiano clangs on found objects. Drummer Matthais Bossi and violinist Carla Kihlstedt also help create a cacophonous cipher you haven't heard since the time your grandpappy dropped the Victrola playing the Einstürzende Neubauten's latest phonograph cylinder on a pussycat in heat.