Best Songs from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History
Of Natural History is the second studio album by avant-rock / metal group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum via Mimicry Records. A very unique album with some downright horrific songs littered throughout.
A diverse masterpiece that constantly switches between softly sung, eerie sections, and highly aggressive growling. The spoken word elements are also quite an interesting addition that spices the song up to some extent as well. The use of xylophones and glockenspiels are where I find this song to really stand out however, especially in the last 4 minutes, which are extremely atmospheric and beautiful.
I love how demented this song sounds, almost like some sort of twisted nursery rhyme in sections. The female vocals are at their best here as well, switching between nice and pained quite regularly, with a constant sense of urgency throughout.
Despite the fact that the majority of the album is weird, intense and downright terrifying in places, this song is absolutely beautiful. The deep vocals are extremely high quality, with the falsetto being great at establishing the contrast of the album, being somewhat offputting and creepy, perfectly summing up the album.
This song is essentially one massive buildup, with a slow, eerie start and a simple guitar riff, building up into some chilling female vocals and more strange rhythm. From this tentative start, with spots with almost complete silence, everything further builds up until it becomes incredibly heavy and intense.
Extremely intense song with a lot of focus on pure strangeness, with strange vocalisations and 'la la la' vocals spread throughout. The rhythmic patterns throughout are nothing short of insane, and the melody sounds like something straight out of a Mr Bungle album, an all around awesome song.
Extremely offputting, with extremely clearly sung lyrics to have people truly be able to hear and absorb the grotesque imagery created. While there isn't much else to this song other than said imagery, it's definitely more than enough to have me like this song quite a lot.
While structurally similar to an interlude, with the majority of the song being instrumental and any lyrics being a single repeated phrase, I find this song to stand very well on its own, being strangely catchy in parts while also perfectly bridging the gap between the two songs surrounding it.
Not much to say here other than it's a highly amusing little song that I'm sure expresses how many of us feel about cockroaches.
I honestly find this song to drag on far too long, and while the atmospheric nature of the song is cool, it just doesn't do enough for me to find it an enjoyable listen in the slightest, making its 14 minute runtime quite unfortunate. If it only went for about 5 minutes, I'd find this song to be extremely good, but as it stands, it does close off the album in a disappointing way.
An interesting experimental interlude that doesn't really go anywhere, but still isn't too bad, definitely somewhat less impressive than most other songs here.