Band:	Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Album:	Of The Last Human Being
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Avantgarde rock
Release date:	February 23, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Salamander In Two Worlds
02. Fanfare For The Last Human Being
03. El Evil
04. Bells For Kith And Kin
05. Silverfish
06. S.P.Q.R.
07. We Must Know More
08. The Gift
09. Hush, Hush
10. Save It!
11. Burn Into Light
12. Old Grey Heron
13. Rose-Colored Song

Out of the weirdest sides of metal, an oddity comes out of hibernation. Welcome to the reopening of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum!

There are two angles I can approach this album from. On one side, this is a reunion album, or at least an album coming after a very very long hiatus. On that front, this is the first Sleepytime Gorilla Museum album since 2007's In Glorious Times. Even if quite a few of the band's members have since then got together in Free Salamander Exhibit, 2016's Undestroyed felt like it leant more on the experimental rock side of the band's original sound rather than the avant-garde metal one. Plus that only had part of the original lineup, meanwhile Of The Last Human Being has all five members as we left them off on In Glorious Times. In more ways than one, Of The Last Human Being is a continuation of that album.

On the other side, this is an avant-garde metal album, and also one where there's much more emphasis on the "avant-garde" part than the "metal" part. Heaviness is part of it, but a lot of it seems to be less centered on being metallic, even if there's definitely more in terms of actual metal than the sound that Free Salamander Exhibit had. It's more like a mix of experimental rock sounds among which metal in its avant-garde metal form is just one part. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't call it the most defining of the experimental rock sounds present here, and even if since first encountering the band I have listened to more experimental rock and I can pinpoint similarities to the avant-prog of King Crimson, the Rock In Opposition of Henry Cow, the brutal prog of Naked City, the zeuhl of Magma, or the krautrock of Can, the post-industrial Einstürzende Neubauten, the zolo of Cardiacs, but I also can't completely pick apart what goes on in each part of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's sound.

A lot goes into the sound, even instrumentally the band makes a point to emphasize how unusual and homemade instruments like nyckelharpa and pedal-action wiggler join the more usual rock instrumentation. Of course all of the unusual-ness and the need to go out of the box can create some moments that are a bit too obnoxious for the own good (see "Save It!", but I find that too be the case less often than I'd expect with such an experimental band. Some of the material here has been written before the release of the previous album, which explains why it sounds this much as a continuation of what they did nearly two decades ago, but mostly I'm surprised how well moments that sound relatively straight-forward (like how mellow and atmospheric "Silverfish" or "Hush Hush" feel) can flow without compromising the band's innovative ethos. It's just the right amount of zany to feel exciting while still being digestible. Stuff like the dark cabaret of "We Must Know More" seems to have became such an integrated part of the avant-garde metal ethos through acts like Pensées Nocturnes that it feels less out there all these years later.

Of The Last Human Being, apart from being a grand reopening, should show how avant-garde elements don't always have to be overwhelming and go head to head against more straight-forward songwriting.