Discovering King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard was a mind-blowing revelation for me. I matured enough to finally check out modern bands after high school when I would declare that no good music came out after 1979, but still, the majority of the bands I'd listen to wore their influences from The Beatles or Beach Boys and other 60's bands on their sleeves. So, when it came time that I first heard about King Gizzard, I was pretty hesitant to check them out. I read that they were a metal group with punk roots that started in the early 2010's so I brushed them off as some shitty crust punk, who, judging that they come from Australia, probably sang about getting wasted and cavorting the outback. Not really interesting to me. But after thinking they were simply a punk-metal band, I was checking out Rate Your Music's best of lists for psychedelic pop in the 2010's and curiously, saw a King Gizzard album. I was super confused by this plus the cutesy, colourful cover and the psychedelic title of "Paper Mache Dream Balloon". I checked it out and didn't get it at first but after a few listens, I liked it. Nothing blew me away, but I appreciated the fully acoustic sound and some of the melodies really stuck with me.
Once I realized that to truly "get" King Gizzard, you need to completely throw expectations of what you think they are as a band out the window, then I appreciated them. You only have to look at their body of work. 2013 and 2014 saw psychedelic rock with "Float Along/Fill Your Lungs" and "I'm In Your Mind Fuzz", then they go completely acoustic and poppy with "Paper Mache". Add a experiment in Eastern music and microtonality with 2017's "Flying Microtonal Banana" and soft jazz-pop with 2018's "Sketches of Brunswick East", it's obvious that the band isn't afraid to do anything and usually excel at it. And that's just to name a few. Hell, in roughly 2 weeks from now (of this writing), they're going to be releasing a pure thrash metal album. Another thing that you realize about the group is the sheer insane prolificness of these dudes. Their first album was released in 2012 and they've already released 14 full length studio albums. Add the new album coming out on the 16th of August and that makes 15. And to top that all off, 5 of those albums all came out in 2017. Think about that. 5 whole albums in one year. Insane.
But nothing in their catalog, to me, compares to the sheer majesty that is 2016's Nonagon Infinity. A sprawling mountain of a record that incorporates shredding hard rock, psychedelic jamming and the band's first experiments with the microtonal tuning that they would dive deep into the following year. Wrap all that up into 9 tracks that that bleed and flow into each other, creating one song of 41 minute of uninterrupted wackiness. What's even cooler is that the beginning of the 1st track Robot Stop is actually the ending of the final track Road Train so if you go on YouTube, you can find a 3 and a half hour version where the album constantly loops over and over multiple times, hearing it as it's intended. And the great thing is, it'd easy to do this and have the album become boring or repetitive, but each track, while keeping the momentum of the piece going, has enough variations and changes to keep things interesting throughout. You get the sense that each track can stand on their own but also serve the purpose of the entire piece. A lot of times with albums like this, concept or otherwise, if you take certain tracks alone out of the context of the fuller thing, they tend to not work as standalone songs, but here you could listen to the album on shuffle and still have a good time. I wouldn't recommend that as I suggest listening to it as it was presented, but all 9 tracks have their strong points.
A concept album about seemingly the end of the world, or perhaps the beginning of a new one, the album does one of my favourite musical things in the usage of leitmotifs (musical phrases that are brought back and re-used throughout the album). This creates a grander, cinematic atmosphere, probably due to the usage being extremely common in film scores. The Who's Tommy is probably the best example of the usage in rock music, or the 2nd side of The Beatles' Abbey Road. The band also uses leitmotifs throughout their entire catalogue. This, along with common themes and returning characters (I'm looking at you, Han-Tyumi), caused fans of the band to coin a concept called "The Gizzverse". That's a whole other article for another but the gist of it is that all of their albums are connected within a bigger story. You can see examples of this on the covers of this album, plus Mind Fuzz, and Murder of The Universe with a similar looking castle, but each cover, the album looks more and more broken and destroyed. The Gizzverse is wayyyyy too complicated to get into here and even the band themselves don't really put much stock into as, again, it was a fan theory, but there's definitely something going on there and Nonagon Infinity was the first album that I heard and found out about it. Of course, being the way I am, I had to go down the rabbit hole and it's super interesting.
Overall, the album is a great album to either put and turn of your mind to rock out to, or to study the intricate changes and ebbs and flows. It's easy to see the album as a simple hard rock album which is how I viewed it when I first heard it. I thought "Holy shit, this album is great!" but after multiple listens, I really appreciated how well fleshed out each piece was. You get the sense that band really thought out the composition of the album without losing the fun urgency of the sound.
Key Tracks: Again, the album's songs are meant to be listened to as one full, uninterrupted piece, so I look at it as one long 40+ minute song. It's all good.
NONAGON INFINITY OPENS THE DOOR
NONAGON INFINITY OPENS THE DOOR
WAIT FOR THE ANSWER TO OPEN THE DOOR
NONAGON INFINITY OPENS THE DOOR
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