In Glorious Times

What are these glorious times? Who is in them? How long do they last?  These are questions that the Museum’s 3rd studio album leaves unasked. But in 2007, it seems that glory came with changes of state, things giving way to other things, other forms. (The dead become laughter, salt, etc…) These secular Transfigurations drive the album from beginning to end, settling into unforeseen change and confusion. This confusion was first brought to the concert hall, to the microphone, opening the show with uncertain hesitation, apologies, and the comaraderie of shared fear. This invocation of “The Companions” also opens the album, veering wildly from paranoia to invulnerability, as in the answering-machine messages from Idiot Flesh light and puppet-master Brad Caswell: “I’m too strong now. I can’t lose. I try, but I’m too strong. I stole everything from you. I even stole your disaster.” The 3rd part of this triptych of a song introduces the transfiguring chain of substitutions, whereby the “recuerdo guarda…su aliento” : the memory guards the breath. “Behold the breath of the dragon.”  Initially this song was to become a video, but its 10-minutes defied shortening, so director Adam Feinstein was sent a demo of the yet-unfinished “Helpless Corpses Enactment,” which he took to immediately, despite (or perhaps because of) “never having listened to metal.” In fact, the band had never done anything quite as thoroughly metal, with all pitchless growl-vocals over death-metal riffs and black-metal cascades, but with Carla’s actual violin ensuring a novel instrumentation. It has already been confessed that the bulk of the lyrics were set to rhythm on a crowded BART train, reading and whispering (chucklingly) from “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce, a fact not-admissible when the album was first released. It has finally entered the public domain, but at its first New York performance, copies of the lyrics were distributed with the invitation to sing along. Immediately after the set, backstage, Carla’s father, Tycho Kihlstedt, alerted the band to the real dangers of lawsuit at the hands of Joyce’s grandnephew, which he’d seen in action as a teacher. A “Stop the presses!” went out that night, and a diverting blurb was substituted. Ah, the dangers of book-metal. (But the video is a sumptuous masterpiece, the work of many hands, and it has brought the museum to the attention of those who like to see snails on food on TV.)  The “Puppet Show” started as just that - a nightly small “puppet show” written fresh each day by Matthias, often using hand-puppets made by Nils’ mother Mickie, and introducing the song. Dan’s “Formicary” is dedicated to his parents, whose legacy as eco-warriors in northern CA can be traced in his songs. Carla’s “Angle of Repose” echoes the legacy of her descent from Hungarian fiddle-players who crossed borders (and live, rocked the crowd at the Museum’s first show in Hungary in 2025. The buried become stories, which, planted, come up singing, which buried…and so on until the chain arrives at “persistently plastic things,” which may be the end of the line, settling into a final heap at the titular “angle.”  “Ossuary” introduces a new band-member and a 5th composer: Michael Mellender, whose seemingly borderless range of instruments and intricate pieces continue to drive the band forward today, also adding another heavy voice. “Suffer the lathe.” Michael initially replaced Moe! on percussion. At the time - ’05’ - he was living at The Nursery, sharing a wall with the band’s rehearsal room, so naturally he stepped in and played everything perfectly the first time. His instruments and playing of Dan’s homemade soon expanded and have never stopped. His instrumental - “The Widening Eye” - closes the record and features Carla on the percussion guitar. A video for “Eye” was also made, by Ri Crawford (whose stop-motion animation is increasingly famous in the films of fellow-Oaklander -Boots Riley).  “The Salt Crown” is the centerpiece of the transfiguration theme, in which stone uses “our watery mouths” to call itself by a new name, and “our watery eyes” to watch itself standing. At the end of 2005, the salt crown was put on by Per Frykdahl, band artist and Nils’ brother, whose long dance with mental illness and its drugs (and heroin and its legal substitute) finally came to a peaceful end. His drawings and “beat poetry” cover the album, and his hilarious answering-machine messages appear between the songs, accusing himself of being “corrupt.. and also legless.”  “The Only Dance” grows out of Matthias’ harmonically rich piano-writing and a poem by Wallace Stevens, perhaps an even less likely source for rock music than Joyce. “The Greenless Wreath” is a love song in the transfiguration theme, written on a rare solitary tour-stroll up Mt. Royal in Montreal, in which winter arrived with a breath. Carla’s keyed-fiddle, a Swedish nyckelharpa opens the stately formality of the folk-dance, in which one can “hold exhaustion close” and “fall in love with ghosts.” Don’t we all, sooner or later?   In glorious times?