What’s notable about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s latest album, 2024’s Of the Last Human Being, is how much the long-running avant-garde band sounds like they did when they released their first album in 2001. The band got together in Oakland, Calif., in 1999, and I’ve always heard their music as an update of the pioneering rock avant-garde moves of Frank Zappa and King Crimson, with elements of hardcore and unclassifiable improvised music thrown in for good measure. Of the Last Human Being runs for 65 minutes and encompasses Crimson-style riffage and Zappa-leaning bricolage. Most of the album was begun in 2010 and 2011, with additional recording done later. You could be forgiven for thinking you’re hearing a prog band from the early 1970s that has decided to incorporate hardcore into their sound, and Of the Last Human Being contains quite a bit of rock music that does elude classification — check out something titled “Old Grey Heron.” In many ways, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum actually improves upon those abrasive time-signature techniques you might recall from King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black and Discipline. The result is an album you can groove to in your most existentially challenged moments. They’re releasing Triptych, which collects their first three studio albums, in October.
8 p.m. at The Mil at Cannery Hall
1 Cannery Row
