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The booking on this show was several kinds of adventure, from what I heard. With all the dust settled, it's just two bands on the bill, and Sick Guns are kind of a strange choice to open for Sleepytime. They're a fun, young punk band. They're a little sloppy and have a lot of attitude. A lot of the songs are in a sort of grinding mid-tempo, which goes oddly with their screechy/noisy energy; the fast ones work a bit better. I like a lot of what the guitars are doing. The melodies are pretty simple, but the singer has a fantastic voice and really sells them. There's a song that they introduce as being in favor of abortion; I'm not quite sure I can make out what they say, but I really hope it's called "Midwife Crisis."
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have set up a fairly absurd amount of equipment on that tiny little stage. (Sick Guns actually played on the floor in front of it.) They have a drummer and a percussionist, plus three more members, each of whom plays a variety of instruments, many homemade. Plus their own lighting rig. So there's a fair amount of swapping pieces in and out between songs, and I don't see the Pedal-Operated Wiggler onstage. This will prove to be my only disappointment of the evening. They play a bunch of unfamiliar new stuff this evening, and it's seriously advanced and tricky; it's telling, I think, that a section in eleven comes as a relaxing, danceable break from all the weirdness. Not that I can do so very much dancing, as the area in front of the stage is PACKED, which is great to see on a Monday night. And speaking of weirdness, Nils' stage banter is one of the freakiest and most fascinating successions of personae I've ever seen. The first piece begins with a gently, tunefully crooned, "All the desperate people are coming out tonight," and ends with him imploring us to lock the doors. He has such a weird and convincing urgency that it's hard not to believe that he really wants the doors locked. Carla plays less violin tonight than when I've seen them in the past, and more percussion guitar. (A disembodied guitar neck mounted horizontally and played with drumsticks, with which she strikes, frets, and bows the strings, sometimes all at once.) The absence of the Wiggler is partially compensated with the Slide Piano Log. And the new percussionist plays some horns, as well as miscellaneous percussion and second drumkit. In addition to the unfamiliar stuff, we get a couple of powerhouses from their newer album—"The Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity Opens the Discussion" is introduced as a gospel number, and it is, in a satanic sort of way—and one from the first album, the almost but not quite entirely wordless "Ambugaton." (There's just the one word; no prize for guessing what it is.) After an hour, we're all pretty wrung out, but there is more time, and we the faithful will not be denied our dose of the iconic and definitive SGM song, "Sleep Is Wrong." They stretch it out extravagantly: Carla's vocal has a jazz singer's melodic fearlessness, and the bit in the middle that's just a little audio joke about falling asleep expands into a freaky a capella scat sonata for five voices, with murmuring and howling and barking, which goes on for minutes before they break almost seamlessly back into the song. It's a thoroughly satisfying ending.
