Show Review: Visualize Industrial Collapse!

Main Act: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Opening Acts: Mute Socialite, Jason Webley
Venue: Neumos

Jason Webley has, in my experience, never failed to deliver the goods. Each album, while not all masterpieces, is excellent and interesting. He has a unique voice in folk music, somewhere between a seafaring pirate and roaming vagabond. How he got paired with the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was a question that inspired much speculation and honestly had an answer which was ultimately less spectacular then I thought it would be. But how this show came to be isn’t as important as the show itself. I like Neumos, it’s a good venue. Good size, shape and atmosphere. I got to the show when doors opened an hour before the show actually started. Fortunately, I didn’t go alone and had people to talk to through the monotonous pre-show music. The first act of the evening was Mute Socialite, an instrumental metal ensemble that had two drummers, one of whom was Moe! Staiano, a former member of Sleepytime. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of dual drummers and I like a nice powerful drum sound, stereo drums all the better. With that Mute Socialite had one thing going for it and little else. Fortunately they didn’t play long and weren’t uninteresting, actually, they were fairly entertaining, even at one moment covering a section of Sleepytime's “Sleep is Wrong”.

After Mute Socialite hustled off stage, Webley was on. The first time I saw Webley he had a full band, tonight it was just him, an accordion, guitar and jug of coins. Any skepticism I had at the idea of his solo show was crushed utterly by the sheer entertainment of his performance. Obviously, this is how he began I thought, playing solo shows with sparse resources. It was a very raw performance, with Webley playing “The Last Song”, “Dance While the Sky Crashes Down” and “Icarus” among others. One of the coolest things was watching him provide his own percussion by stamping his feet. The accordion is a hefty instrument and anyone who can play it and stamp out their own percussion deserves your respect. Like the first time I saw him, he was funny and charismatic and an overall nice guy. Other similarities were the performance of “There’s Not A Step We Can Take That Does Not Bring Us Closer” which involved the crowd becoming an orchestra of violins and trombones. Once again I was a trombone, and my vocal chords are still paying for it. This turned out to be the 10th year anniversary of Webley’s career and in honor of that he preformed “Music that Tears Itself Apart” and subsequently convinced the entire room to start tickling each other. The man puts on good shows.

After Webley left the stage, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum began to set up. This in itself was something to behold. The Museum has a lot of homemade instruments, which have names like “The Sledgehammer Dulcimer”, “Piano Log” and “The Vatican”. Many of these are percussion/string combination devices which produce familiar yet alien sounds. These instruments were, I believe, assembled by their Bass player Dan Rathburn. But no matter who built the instruments, one cannot help but recognize the band genius. Dressed in quasi-tribal outfits and makeup, the band creates a cacophonous sound that could very well be the disorganized collapse of society as we know it. Tagging a genre could be difficult but ultimately I decided on “Avant-Progressive/Chamber Metal”. Inventive percussion, invented instruments and philosophically apocalyptic lyrics made for an excellent combination. I only took my eyes off the band to grin manically at my comrades. Seriously, this shit rules and it was something of an anomaly that I was able to see it. If not for Jason Webley this probably would have been a 21+ show and it was unless you got you tickets in advance like I did. Because of that I was able to witness the brilliance of songs like “Helpless Corpses Enactment” and “The Angel of Repose”. Carla Kihlstedt, Dan Rathburn, Nils Frykdahl, Matthias Bossi and Michael Mellender create something brilliant and terrifying every time they step on stage. The show was loud, chaotic and powerful. And yet, completely contained as it was clear that the band had these death-prog anthems down to a science. Maybe it was a science. Each member of the band except Frykdahl played at least three instrument, homemade and otherwise. And they were all fantastic players at them too. What made this show one the best I’ve been to in a while was that I was right in front and had an unobstructed view of everything. During one song, Rathburn was playing a trombone right in my face and I had to lean back in order to avoid being hit in the eye. They played for a long time, ending with a fifteen minute prog-jam starting from the base of “Sleep Is Wrong”. I left completely exhausted and thoroughly pleased with myself for having gone.


See also: My reviews for The Cost of Living by Jason Webley & "In Glories Times" by The Sleepytime Gorilla Museum