Sleepytime Gorilla Museum [rank: 548] based on users subscribed

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"Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are an American avant-rock band, formed in 1999 in Oakland, California. The band tours frequently. They have played often in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Area, but also have traveled other parts of the U.S. by tour bus. Their live performances have featured puppet shows, pseudo-scientific scholarly presentations, and performances by members of the Butoh group inkBoat.

The band uses many homemade devices as instruments, such as the Viking Rowboat. Dan Rathbun - who has created the lion's share of the band's idiosyncratic instruments - plays, among other self-made instruments (though he uses a common bass guitar most of the time), a custom stringed bass instrument referred to as Piano Log, which uses piano strings and is possibly more than 7 feet long; it is played with two sticks: one in the left hand generally used as a fret, and another in the right hand to strike the strings. Percussionist Michael Mellender's instruments consist of restaurant kitchen equipment, trash can lids, and other 'found' metal objects, in addition to traditional percussion instruments. One of the more infamous instruments used by the band was Moe! Staiano's Popping Turtle (now residing in Brooklyn, NY). It can be heard in the song 'Sleep is Wrong', about 1:21 into the song.

SGM's music can be roughly likened as something akin to avant-rock or avant-prog, but it practically escapes any rigorous categorization so that people usually have to name-drop different kinds of bands in order to give some sort of scope or conception of what they sound like. Some names that have come up in reviewers' texts include Mr. Bungle, Thinking Plague, Univers Zero, White Zombie, Anglagard, King Crimson, Gwar, and so on; while not excessively naming bands in his review of SGM's second album Of Natural History, David Moore of Pitchfork Media thinks, in the same swoop, that SGM's debut album Grand Opening and Closing was an amalgam of Meshuggah and Secret Chiefs 3, resulting in 'some truly cracked prog-metal anthems.'"

[reproduced or excerpted from the Wikipedia article "Sleepytime Gorilla Museum" and its use is thus licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License]