If music were organic matter, then their albums are ever-changing entities: initial highlights are often superseded on further exploration, favourite tracks replaced by less obvious moments, while riffs or bursts of noise from four or five albums back might suddenly rear their heads again. More news on that shall be forthcoming – fans of the band know by now that King Gizzard don’t do things by halves. is both a stand-alone work and also part of a bigger musical picture. All come together to represent the next-level of the expanding Gizz sound. There’s walk-on theme song ‘K.G.L.W’, the celestial disco-funk of ‘Intrasport’, the righteous life-giving staccato rock of ‘Ontology’, epic stoner-sludge closer ‘The Hungry Wolf Of Fate’, which ends the album in an abrupt burst of white noise. So now they return to the microtonal tunings on K.G., an album best described as a pure distillation of the King Gizzard sound, one that cherry picks the best aspects of previous albums and contorts them into new shapes and via defiantly non-Western rock scales. It was a liberating studio-based experiment which surprisingly translated seamlessly and spawned some of favourite songs to play live.” “But we didn’t think we would play it live as the music dictated a new medium that requires different instruments, new flight cases and so. “ FMB was one of the purest and most enjoyable recording experiences we’ve had, and the ideas just kept coming” explains de facto bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Stu Mackenzie.
Here were songs in tunings more common in traditional Turkish or Arabic music. It spawned a plethora of live favourites such as ‘Rattlesnake’, ‘Sleep Drifter’, ‘Nuclear Fusion’ and ‘Billabong Valley’ and showed the wider world that the Gizz paint from a palette that extends far beyond the musical colours of western rock. That it was the first of five released by the band that year and was only part the story – a story made all the remarkable by the fact it was recorded using a microtonal musical scale that requires quarter-tone tunings, on instruments custom-made for the occasion. Back in 2017, the band released Flying Microtonal Banana, now one of their most highly regarded albums. Music that will live on long after a virus has passed. It is the contents and the sheer visceral power of music that matters. Truth be told, the practicalities of the creation of K.G. Hell, on paper Covid-19, with its monstrous yet unseen face, ecological implications and new language, even sounds like an abandoned concept for a King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard album. This is the Gizz firing on all sonic cylinders, for if ever a band were built to swiftly adapt to adverse circumstance then it is them. But have no fear! Not a drop of that unnamed alchemical something that makes this band so special is missing. In the wake of a global pandemic, it’s a collection of songs that saw the six members of the band retreating to their own homes scattered around Melbourne, Australia to compose and record remotely. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard return with new album K.G., their sixteenth since they formed in 2010.
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