Let there be, PEACE , brothers and my sisters , put away purposeful misunderstanding which seperates ourselves from our source in service to our pithy egos (read: evil or d-evil ); NOW, make that choice as IAM ~
Beautiful post. I'll be getting this one.
Thanks and peace.
Of Natural History
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
a masterpiece of modern music, imho
Snippets from a review by John Hagelbarger
"First, of Natural History consists of a concept album: The songs, production, liner notes, and packaging all tie together to make a statement of radical environmentalism - how Mankind has come to act as if we own the Earth, how we do not in fact own it, how disaster looms over us, and how we've brought that down upon our own heads. The band express this in terms of their peculiar mythology, some of which derives from the eccentric history and philosophy of the original Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, some from the band's home-brewed legend of the “Donkey-headed Adversary of Humanity”, and some from the Italian Futurists and the Unabomber – a couple of new additions to their stew-pot of ideas. (for more about all this, see Appendix I.) Although they, typically, connect only a few of the dots, they also present a clear enough outline to guess at the rest of the picture.
On the other hand, the sound of their progressive-rock side may not appear quite as obviously as the others, but their musical esthetic comes very much from that quarter. It provides their dissonant, chromatic harmonic language, their ferocious meter-changes and cross-rhythms, their nonstandard song structures, and, most important, their governing approach of using different styles like mixable colors in a paint-box, rather than discrete scraps to collage or sealed compartments to work within. Other industrial acts seem to think like cutting-edge visual artists - sculpting raw sound for pure visceral brutality, morphing piled-up textures into other piled-up textures, and trying for an endless tension with no release. SGM don't. They may admire such sound-art greatly and aspire to its single-minded power, but they can't stop thinking like composers: building music in terms of melodic development, harmonic progressions, cycles of tension and release, musical contrasts, and modulations of key. And in the process, they've set themselves to do something else nearly impossible: to bring Apollonian orchestral scope, compositional skill, musicality, and professionalism to an over-the-top Dionysian musical idiom all about emotional meltdowns, unpredictable performances, and flamboyantly dysfunctional lives brought raw and unedited onto the stage. Without giving up any of its intensity. The result may sound different from most progressive rock, but it works in a similar way, sounds musically right rather than wrong, and has its own type of scorched, desolate, contorted, volcanic-landscape beauty.
But under that racketiness lies some traditionally good songwriting. Most of the tunes have strong, memorable melodies, at some point if not throughout. And even at their noisiest, they also have a large helping of hooks – whether the lilting falsetto nursery-rhyme bridge to “Gunday’s Child”, the twanging odd-metered guitar riff on “The Donkey-headed…,” the careening Moog-like violin counter-line for “Freedom Club”, the lurching rhythm-section of “Bring Back the Apocalypse”, or the percussive BONGs, CLANGs, and SCREECHes in “Babydoctor”. Unlike most avant-prog, but very much like the best of Seventies prog, of Natural History works way better as pop music than you'd think. A lot of it, in fact, is pretty damn catchy. "
"The Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity Opens the Discussion"
The d.h.a.o.h. opens the book
The d.h.a.o.h. opens the discussion
I am the adversary and must remain the adversary
I am not yours to embrace
I am not yours to invoke
The d.h.a.o.h. sleeps in the hall
Watches for signs of our imminent demise in the scratchings on the wall
The d.h.a.o.h. sleeps in the park
Listens for sounds of our eminent decay in the singing of a solitary lark Mankind is a plague
Breathing hell into every corner of the rotting earth
Even now in this our finest hour I feel the hate of every stone, tree & flower
Even now we fall under the long shadow of the donkey's ears
Even now we listen for the slow grinding of the donkey's teeth
Lalala we weep in the din of the stomping of the donkey's black hoof
Lalala we weep for the slow coming of our doom (Dance)
Mankind is a plague
Breathing hell into every corner of the rotting earth
Even now in this our finest hour I feel the hate of every stone, tree & flower
Eaters of the soil take us into the ground
Death by worm
Eaters of the air drive us from the blue
Death by sparrow
Eaters of the sea take us into the green
Death by eel
Eaters of the scraps take in our beds
Death by dog
Eaters of the soil take us into the ground
Death by sand
Eaters of the air drive us from the sky
Death by flower
Eaters of the green take us into the sea
Death by water
Eaters of the scraps take us in our beds
Death by stone
Death by silence
Death by sorrow
The d.h.a.o.h. closes the book
The d.h.a.o.h. closes the discussion
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