King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

especially their microtonal/weird tuning stuff, a lot of stuff on that Banana record sounds great.

not so keen on the new one with narration, it seems extraneous

Yeah i meant polygondwa above as their best record of the year. I wish they werent as repetitive melody wise though. Like back in the Fill Your Lungs days..

they seem like they're excellent live too- the main guy definitely borrows some john dwyer moves tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGHgpVU3UuU

https://youtu.be/_Eg3OUQPayk

Gold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnOJkrRv3g

Who can report on the new one ?

bit of a psychedelic soul vibe. mellower stuff, a la paper mache dream balloon and sketches of brunswick east

Sounds like mediocre b-sides for all previous 4, except for one surprising and great doom metal/Uncle Acid style song (Great Chain Of Being)

"muddy water" sounds like a victory lap

"barefoot desert" is dope. 1 year, 64 songs. damn!

destroying all that will keep us heading for a meta-thesis

\m/

chill band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENCswmcSALI

I only need to see nardwuar once every 5 years or so but that is good servietting

Friend last night: "have you heard ... they're called like ... Daniel Strudel and the Noodle Doodle?"

Omg actual lol

ILM don't care about Gizzard and you may be right at this point.Used to be great though.

ok i listened to the latest i was erm not expecting straight 86 speed metally thrash. Its not terrible i guess.

It made me think of HNIA’s different smart-ass visitation to metalfrom 2016, which was like, sunshine prog-metal(?). HNIA’s album was actually much more interesting imo.

lot of young aussie bro's really really like these dudes (and possibly drugs??)

because i'm slightly interested in what they're on about, repeated listens haven't been bad, also the guit style is more thrash than beedleybeedleybeedlebeedely. i guess ecoconscious thrash shit is closer fit for olds who are more garage or postpunk maybe. 'i have gone insane-o i lust for volcano pee with molten lava give me my nirvana' and 'auto-cremate! self-immolate!'

Taking my son to see them in a few weeks, he's a big fan. Trying to get caught up on their endless catalog. They seem like great musicians, very creative and intense, but the sheer repetition of their approach wears me down.

Which ones should I listen to if I want to hear them mix it up more? So far I've liked Flying Microtonal Banana the most, but I've barely scratched the surface.

nonagon infinity is the most accessible to early olds imo, it's relentless and stirring.

i love the first one that was my intro, which is very psych- can't remember the name, it has Head On/Pill?

I'm in Your Mindfuzz is pretty strong imo.

I was meh on Fishing For Fishies which is working that sound conceit so hard, or maybe not the sound I wanted. The recent is really fun, but it's way chewing gummy to me. Still the more I listen, there more I am charmed by it.

I can't remember Polygondwanaland, so...

I was half-hoping the new one would be even more thrashy, which is kind of a funny thing — they're constantly churning out so many records in so many different veins that you wind up with a fairly loose attachment to any of them sounding particularly Gizzardy. Or maybe it's just the nature of thrash that once you blend a little of it into what you're doing, it starts feeling like you might as well thrash all the way; it's kind of an extremist genre!

At some point they should release a detailed guide to their working methods, like a productivity self-help book for rock musicians. At this point I'm just curious how they divide up their time.

Minimize chord progressions, tempo changes, syncopation, and vocal melodies seems to be part of it, at least for the straightforward rock LPs.

gonna guess no

― some men just want to watch the world Bern (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, May 4, 2016 5:06 PM (three years ago)

this is definitive

Is it?

gonna guess yes

Infest The Rats' Nest is kind of a wild record. I think I like them in metal mode more than some. This pretty much sounds like old school Metallica meets Sleep.

one of the better metal albums of 2019 so far imo

you could say "it's just kind of a gloss of common metal ideas" to which i would say so is like 80% of metal nowadays

I saw them play in Austin last night, pretty good show. Huge, extremely hyped up crowd. The new songs went over really well, but there was a little too much time spent on the slow jazzy numbers, letting all the band members sing songs, and some endless boogie beats. Needed a bit more of the fast-paced material.

Ooh, I'm liking K.G. so far. A return to the microtonal shit.

Very fun yes, and some enjoyable curveballs as well

K.G. is indeed really good.

The Live In SF LP is great as well

That's next on my list to spin, actually.

First half is all Nonagon all the time, and it ends with a fantastic Head On-Pill that also goes Nonagon when yr least expecting it

What's KG? I loved microtonal banana but never really got this band beyond that.

It's the name of their latest album

it has like a dance track which feels ~weird~, but what, am i gonna tell THIS band how to genre?

Yeah, “Intrasport”, the weird disco track stands out a little, but it segues so nicely into the next song that I can’t hate it.

KG is very Microtonal, it's great

This rules.

LW out Friday, lol

i was into this band for a bit but haven't kept up with them at all, and now i see them being used on social media (even tiktok) as shorthand for annoying arcane prog rock dorks in the same way as tool, so i guess they've hit the big time

they're still great, love both kg & lw - strong albums both!

with the massive volume of albums they've put out, there are absolutely some duds, but there are so many good ones as well. If LW continues with the direction of KG, them I'm totally down.

Not a massive expert on them but they always strike me as great fun - certainly moreso than Tool!

Yeah, there's nothing po-faced abt Gizz, they do not take themselves seriously like that at all.

LW is literally the other half of KG, more excursions on the seas of microtonality. TBH i prefer KGLW to the Flying Microtonal Banana LP that started it all off.

https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/l-w

yet another record!

A great one, too

from Consequence on FB:

After departing Spotify, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard made their entire catalog available on Bandcamp with a "name-your-own-price" option.
The move has proven massively successful, with the band currently occupying all 25 top spots on Bandcamp's best-selling albums chart.

my dudes!

!!

I bought Phantoms, Flight, Silver Cord, SF 2016, and Omnium

so yeah

Tortoise just snuck into #25 :)

they've got 33 of the top 35 though

I bought Made in Timeland, Omnium, Ice Death, Laminated Denim, Changes, PetroDragonic and Silver Cord. Basically the whole run of albums they didn't ever release on CD.

I'm getting KG and LW

still fucking heavy with flight b741. it just keeps giving. i love belting along to .. well, all of it, but lately "antarctica" - "TAKE ME AWAAAYYYYY i wanna feel the prospects on my face again!"

polygondwanaland: the sort of prog that's heavy on stilted rhythms in unusual time signatures that i'm not very fond of. it's strange that they come across so awkwardly here when they've made unusual time signatures sound very natural in the past

I've avoided this band because their name makes me retch and I feared it'd be some kinda dope smoking sniggering hippie thing but I thought I'd give this album a listen. I've listened to it three times now and... nah, not for me. Good musicians but Ozric Tentacles meets the Cardiacs is never going to appeal to me. I've heard they're quite eclectic so I might listen to another album or two though.

check out "The Silver Cord" or the new "Phantom Island" imho, I'm not as much a fan of the older stuff either

this is the release that hooked me fwiw:

https://bootleggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-bulgaria-25

xxpost Never heard those bands (that I think I only recognize from import UK mags!) but "Omnium Gatherum" imo remains the best place to start with Gizzard. It's all over the place, from metal to krautrock garage to ... other stuff, so if none of that clicks with you then, yeah, prolly not a good match.

^^ that one is also a good call, as it is basically an excellent odds & sods comp

i love em so i may be too close to offer reasonable suggestions but sometimes i think their most successful mode is metal. so if the phrase 'prog metal' does not send you running i'd suggest checking out 'petrodragonic apocalypse'. i like their melodies and songwriting quite a bit but i don't think "ozric tentacles meets the cardiacs" is anything i'd normally be interested in either. for me the appeal of the band came through the lyrics and the concepts, which is their heart imo and what gives a throughline to all their different styles.

I think that's key. They are not dilettantes or goofs, they are engaging with their ideas - musical and lyrical, silly and serious alike - in good faith.

polygwondwanaland is not particularly representative, it's the only album where they commit to that particular sort of heavily syncopated weird time signature prog

https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-san-francisco-16

i really recommend live in san francisco '16 as the best introduction, it covers nearly all the highlights from their early krauty psych rock period (mostly nonagon infinity & i'm in your mind fuzz) but the versions here are much better than the studio albums and it's still a major part of their sound

ice, death, planets, mushrooms & lava is my personal favourite, it's all jazzy, jammy psych epics

phantom island, their most recent, is a solid starting point too - it's 60s psych pop meets 70s roots rock which works better than you would expect

omnium gatherum covers a lot of ground but pretty much none of it is anywhere near their best imo except "the dripping tap" so i don't think it's the best introduction

cosign all of that. i will need to check out that san francisco set soon.

xpost tbf The Dripping Tap is a quarter of the album!

Was at the Royal Albert Hall show on Tuesday - amazing stuff. First set mostly from the new album, with the Covent Garden Sinfonia. RAH rules stipulate there had to be a 30-minute interval and that the house lights had to be up throughout, but the Gizz, sans orchestra, jammed inna-Live-Dead-stylee for 20+ minutes, then dove into an epic Gaia with long jam section in the middle. Second set included orchestra-aided The River, an absolutely monumental orchestra-enabled Crumbling Castle and a version of Dragon (again, w/orchestra) that was heavier than murder.

Awesome. Hope a video goes up somewhere. I posted on the other thread about their rave set last week, 5 of them doing epic rave jamming round a large modular synth set up on a desk, with the drummer at the back doing live rock drumming.

There's another thread? I wish I'd been able to make the rave sets - the YouTubes of them were insane.

The legendary Chicago official boot from a coupla years ago ends with them all around the synth rack as Cavs pounds away in the background, and it is so intense and thrilling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zVah4ymbQo

there's a complete hq video of one of the earlier orchestra shows. it's probably the only one we're going to get because dealing with broadcast rights with the orchestras is more complicated & expensive

honestly i don't really rate the live synth jams much, they have their moments but seem to spend way too much time noodling around doing nothing, every song ends up going for 15 minutes but not in a good way

Yeah but the highs are insane!

There's another thread?

I guess map started it because this one is ostensibly about one album:

all woohoos all the time: the king gizzard and the lizard wizard thread

Thanks Ledge - will follow!