Recap Sleepytime Gorilla Museum at Memorial Union

Despite the frilly medieval pantaloons, black lipstick, and corpse-paint sported by the members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on Saturday at the Memorial Union’s Tripp Commons, the band was definitely not hawking two-for-a-dollar pseudo-goth burgers all night. Soaring through the creepy, violin-soaked set-opener “Babydoctor,” dreadlocked vocalist-guitarist Nils Frykdahl and violinist-vocalist Carla Kihlstedt sung with quivering theatrics as multi-instrumentalist Michael Mellender hammered away at some bells, a few metal pans, and the spokes of a rotating bike wheel that was propped over his percussion rack. The song gradually wound into a discordant funnel cloud of broken chords, screeching violin, primal rhythms, and the otherworldly growl of Frykdahl, while crowd members hopelessly attempted to bob their heads in time.

Between songs, Frykdahl treated the crowd to strange (and often completely nonsensical) stage banter, the tone of which seemed to shift from John Lee Hooker to Rick Moranis at the drop of a dime. “This next song is a dancing song for tree lovers,” Frykdahl slurred—in reference to the twisted, cacophonous, and not exactly danceable “Helpless Corpses Enactment.”

It wasn’t until the chilling “Angle Of Repose” that Dan Rathbun set his bass down and laid a massive 7-foot instrument down on a stand in front of him. The homemade monstrosity—which Rathbun calls a “sledgehammer dulcimer”—was a wooden, log-like object with long piano strings wound to it. Rathbun used his left hand to manipulate the strings and his right hand to hammer at them with a mallet, producing a thunderous bass sound that locked right in with drummer Matthias Bossi. On “Puppet Show,” Frykdahl ditched his regular guitar for a miniature version of the “sledgehammer dulcimer,” called a “percussion guitar.” He used drumsticks to beat and slide some wiggling chord progressions from it, later claiming that the “percussion guitar” was actually “invented in the ’60s for protest songs.” In the tradition of most things Frykdahl told the audience on Saturday night, he was probably full of shit.

SGM pulled plenty of meandering oddities from both 2004’s Of Natural History and 2007’s In Glorious Times, and also played a couple of unreleased tunes called “Salamander” and “Save It” that continue wandering through a similarly crooked, sepia-toned prog-world. Oddly enough, SGM’s set ended up jammed between local power-metal band Lords Of The Trident and Pantera-tinged headbangers Erebus. So after the charmingly titled set-closer “The Donkey-Headed Adversary Of Humanity Opens The Discussion,” Erebus had the unenviable task of closing the show. However, to the local death-metallers’ credit, they offered a respectable sonic pounding to those willing to stick around for it.