Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
In Glorious Times?

"Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way into eternal pain, through me the way among the lost people.

Justice moved my high maker, divine power made me, the highest wisdom and the first love.

Before me nothing was created, except eternal things, and I endure eternally.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

It is with these demonic hendecasyllables, engraved on the gate that gives access to Hell, that the third canto of the first and titular cantica opens, in which the most renowned, majestic, and important work of one of the greatest poets of pre-Renaissance Florence will be divided: the "Commedia" - only later named "divine" - by Dante Alighieri.

And, in all probability, the profane/musical transposition of these mystical terzinas can be found in the latest work of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, a Californian quintet from Oakland led by two former Idiot Flesh (Dan Rathbun, bass: Nils Frykdahl, vocals and guitar) and violinist, as well as vocalist, Carla Kihlstedt, from Charming Hostess. Because the sardonic question posed to the interested parties, "In Glorious Times," is nothing more than a pretext to unleash in front of our eardrums eleven new, fiery, convoluted arrows, in the name of the hallucinated and the hallucination, the experimented and the experimentation, the beastly and the beastliness, the inhuman and the inhumanity. It is a malevolent ride into the most murky spirals of hell, a continuous destruction of what we were used to hear as the most extreme - not only in terms of power. It’s as if the darkest and more claustrophobic Meshuggah started furiously arguing with the King Crimson of "21st Century Schizoid Man", involving Universe Zéro and Tool in the dispute, all while Opeth duet, in the background, with figures of the caliber of Mr. Bungle and Björk. If you don’t even have the slightest and remotest idea of how this album sounds, don’t worry: you’re part of the norm. The implied subtitle also states: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Indeed, no hope, not even a tiny glimmer of sunlight or joyous brightness shines in this album. Even the most lively and brilliant segments are animated by a kind of sadistic and perverse little skeleton, a decoy that seems playful, seems festive, but it’s not at all. And you only understand it in hindsight, to your own cost, while from above the Sleepytime snicker, amused by the confusion and bewilderment that whirl vertiginously in our heads.

The ten minutes and four of "The Companions", the album's opener, seem put there on purpose to totally divert any suspicion about the real intentions of the Californian supergroup. Yet that continuous tinkling of bells, under a male voice that could suit both Queen and Architecture In Helsinki, and those harmonizations so cumbersome and baroque, which sometimes creak and become sharp and cutting, just long enough to recombine in their exaggerated placidity, should suggest something. You should understand that all that glitters is not gold. But, inevitably, just when the doubt arises, here comes the angelic female voice of Kihlstedt, which sweeps away, in all four directions, the dying residues of perplexity left. The listening continues.

And so, they have managed to deceive us. Without getting too flustered.

From now on, a chasm has appeared at the center of Jerusalem. It was them, we know it, right that we know it...? It was them. It seems impossible that they have agreed with Dante, to make us relive even a small part of the horror contained in the bowels of the earth and so well depicted by our illustrious fellow countryman. Thus begins a mad spiral race in the devilish circles. A race with an end marked even before everything was written down.

A florilegium of disturbing dissonances, alchemic scores, sonic degenerations imprisoned and tortured beyond any description: a deviant crossroads between flashes of clean sound, meticulous, detailed, and rich in depth, alternates - and often overlaps - with a resounding force play of baritone choirs coming from the darkest of abysses (the reminiscences of the witch-hunt that revive in "Puppet Show"). Or, again, flashes of seventies progressive rock, excellently played, join a climax of industrial tingling that seems to have little or nothing terrestrial, while the two singers alternate on vocal parts, first with soft and completely out-of-place effusions, then with dark and muddy growls that root in the most blasphemous heresy ("Formicary"). And they give the whole an air that is eerily dazed.

A normal human being would have had enough by now, but Sleepytime forge ahead, unyieldingly, each time offering an unimaginable potpourri of the most disparate genres, as if they wanted to forcefully distinguish all the circles of Hell. And so, like in a terrible nightmare, the elegant "Angle Of Repose" parades, a compliant medley of gypsy dances, continuous backbeat games that progressively demolish the rhythmic tangle of the piece, distinct vocal arabesques that jolt and contort, under a blanket of strings, in rough and rather raw hardcore tirades, in complete contrast to the atmospheres felt a few minutes earlier. Or the shrill guitar riff that, opening "Ossuary", brings to mind the magical superstitions of the ancient Celts, when then everything is violently assaulted with shocking brutality, transforming into a metallic, hallucinatory, and psychotic hybrid in its grandguignolesque accelerations. But also the makeshift and somewhat naive atmospheres of "The Salt Crown", which jump, as if seized by a fatal epilepsy, from the Genesis of "The Knife" to the most feral and seminal crust-core - and it’s a contrast that really seems impossible - up to the threatening sonnolalia ending that can recall something from the latest Scott Walker. And how could we forget the dream-like torment of the jam session of "The Only Dance" which, at times, seems to break out of the canons - if they can be defined as such - of the great John Zorn?

But the worst is yet to come. The hypogeum is near but, to get there, we must endure one last, great torture. "Helpless Corpses Enactment" is, beyond any doubt, the pinnacle of the entire album, The point where Hell is prodded and vomits its foul-smelling fumes outside. It sounds as if all the demons of the Earth were in the desert and, to survive, were forced to swallow liters and liters of holy water. It sounds as if a dark shadow descended upon the Earth and oppressed its inhabitants. Suffering, despair, blind and uncontrollable rage that flares up, incendiary, to destroy everything that seemed pleasant to our eyes. A flow of lava driven, at systolic rhythms, by a great double pedal work and a grinding and relentless growl that assails with systematic methodicity the listeners, transfigured into some sort of sacrificial victims. All to reach the "Putrid Refrain" and its electronic deliriums which, from time to time, begin to spin frantically, clashing noisily with common sense.

The journey is over and, with it, something shocking. "In Glorious Times" is an album to buy, to study, to listen to only once. That will be enough.