Sleepytime Gorilla Museum / Secret Chiefs 3 March 24, 2007

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's instrumental array shifts from song to song, including many homemade devices suggestive of the avant-garde, but they are thoroughgoing populists, warmly regarding their varied audiences and embracing their role as entertainers. Though not without humor, their often wide-ranging musical choices are rarely ironic. They love rock. They hate rock: Rock against Rock.

Trey Spruance, Secret Chiefs 3's chief composer and a former guitarist for Mr. Bungle, is a visionary madman capable of instilling both fear and respect in his listeners. Secret Chiefs 3 have existed in various incarnations over the course of the past eight years, and have served as the funnel for Spruance's remarkably far-flung studies of the hermetic mysteries and musical traditions of unknown and underappreciated subgenres. Album titles like Grand Constitution and Bylaws and Book M hint at the music's vaguely metaphysical bent. Over three years in the making, Book of Horizons is Secret Chiefs' most expansive and coherent statement, an alchemical fusion of Morricone-esque cinematic grandeur, midnight surf guitar, traditional Middle Eastern rhythms and time signatures, demonic death metal, and electronic deviance that yields a work of undeniable force.

Official Website: http://www.slims-sf.com