Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Like a Grand Guignol version of Gwar, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum may be too scary and weird for our roots-rockin’, boom-car-bumpin’ Midwestern hills to handle. Resplendent in bestial, gothic pageantry, this charismatic, terrifying New York performance-art-rock troupe combines perverse, homemade instruments with bass, drums and guitar to produce intricate, thunderous and downright demonic music, narrated by the Wagner-meets-Waits vocals of black-toothed Nils Frykdahl and sirenlike Carla Kihlstedt. If many more prog-devil acts like SGM show up, traditional death metal may well go the way of the dodo.