King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

by the way anyone who digs this should check out "N.O.X." on the Motorpsycho album The All is One, which is a similar blend of motorik and hard psychedelic rock. 40 minues long too. kinda makes me wonder if it would've been hyped up more as a separate album. obviously these guys thought this sort of thing would stand on its own.

Good recommendation frogbs, that's a great tune. Motorpsycho was a great discovery for me during the pandemic. Still have a ton of their catalog to discover, but I've fallen hard for everything I've gotten so far, which is everything starting with Death-Defying Unicorn (also got the Blissard 4xCD reissue thing).

you may wanna go a little back for Heavy Metal Fruit, that's when they really started hitting the prog hard and IMO it's one of their best

Definitely on my list, kinda working my way backwards. I think when the new album comes up for pre-order, I'll grab a handful from Stickman.

I'm listening to one of their live shows from last year and it's way harder/bigger than I expected.

going to see them this summer despite not really having listened to much of their music since nonagon infinity. they seem like they'll be fun live though

New album is called "PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation."

Wish I was going this summer, enjoy. I've heard nothing but amazing things about their live shows.

xpost - yep, and per a discussion from another thread, it's not due out until June 16th, but it is completely sold out in every format already.

Apparently many of the variants sold out in 9 minutes. I love these guys, but jfc the tiny pressings and drops drive me absolutely batshit.

they gotta be the only band around right now that could get away with a title like that

well there's a parallel discussion in the billy woods thread about cult-popular hip hop artists like woods and roc marciano and mach-hommy doing similar things

worth checking out - someone asked woods about it in an interview and he said he was not trying to create artificial scarcity, it's just hard for him to find the sweet spot in terms of how many LPs to produce without losing money

yeah, though I think it's a little different for these guys, I suspect there is a bit of intentionality in what they do, because it works. they have fans salivating for these drops and, every time, they sell out nearly instantly. they don't do typical pre-orders, it's precisely timed drops for different regions with different vinyl variants, it reminds me a lot of the hype and drop cycle for like new sneakers. and it works, as someone pointed out on a reddit thread, 6 variants in runs of 10,000 each @ $40 a pop - the band pulled in over 2 million dollars in just a few hours.

correcting faulty numbers there, it was actually runs of 2,000 each, so they "only" cleared half a million in that time frame. still, imagine most artists would kill for those numbers.

enjoying some gizz at the office, great way to momentarily chase away bad vibes

what gizz did you go for?

definitely reckon the dripping tap would annihilate any badvibes

IDPLML

"mycelium" is low key the most positive song ever recorded

They're playing three sold out shows here. Assuming I can get in, I'm trying to figure out which of the three might be the most strategically appealing for a band with 25 albums that I've never seen live before. First show? Third show?

have they announced any themes for the three shows?

Ooh, I never even thought about that. I did a quick google and I think word is they are not going to repeat any songs over the course of the three nights, so ... roll a dice?

I’m going on the 13th.

they've done metal shows, garage shows, etc, before. they're also REALLY GREAT at pacing and planning their setlists - the show i took my then-8yo to a couple of months ago began with a bunch of their thrash jams, then eased into some Nonagon Infinity stuff, and then slipped into a bunch of Butterfly 3000 stuff, and it all worked together so well.

I'll be there tonight, no idea what to expect. I'll be the one looking old and confused and (checks weather) possibly damp.

My only advice as a fellow old is if it is general admission, be careful about standing in the middle of the crowd. I made that mistake when I saw them and almost got crushed as soon as they started playing.

all metal so far!!!!

now stoner krautrock boogie

now space prog

hope you're having a blast these guys sound like a lot of fun

a little too phishy for me at times, but they are all over the place in a good way

This sounds a lot like the show I saw a few years ago. Started off super heavy but after a while shifted into more of a mellow jam mood that I found less engaging.

it's gone back and forth tonight. two hours straight, thought it'd be longer, maybe because of the rain.

the "stoner krautrock boogie" segment/medley was the peak for me, especially the flute song (maybe not coincidentally, this is also when the rain finally stopped). the metal stuff is fun but feels pastichey imo.

Talked to a dude who flew in from Seattle. This was his 15th show this tour, and he said it was a great set. But I get the feeling they don't really do "bad" sets, just always a hodgepodge of their styles.

My buddy, a recovering Phish guy, was impressed. On one hand, he said, there were moments that reminded him of peak 1995 Phish (I trust him), but he also said there was also lots of other stuff that Phish could never authentically pull off, like the metal or krautrock/psych. Maybe Ween could do that, I dunno, I've never really listened to Ween. (I did see a few Ween shirts, but I also saw a kid wearing a Rites of Spring shirt.)

Anyway, it was fun, not really my scene, so a change of pace.

i saw someone wearing a green velvet cape with a fur collar and a ween logo on the back

I know that before they did the metal albums they were anxious that they wouldn't seem like dilletantes, that it wouldn't seem like pastiche. I know Stu's favourite era of metal is that moment when prog hits thrash - And Justice For All-era Metallica - and I think they make a fine fist of that noise. Certainly Gaia is one of the finest metal songs I've heard in years - that groove, those changes.

I like metal KG, but I'm also definitely a metal dilettante

Ha! Me too tbh...

Sounds like a pretty good show! I have to admit I haven't heard much Phish in their stuff just yet, but I haven't seen them live and haven't caught up with any of the recent recordings. I could see them hitting on some similar jam vibes though.

we couldn't really figure out how much jamming was happening - i'm guessing some of the solos were improvised but there would also be sudden shifts in tempo/rhythm that seemed like they had to be planned, so structurally it didn't seem as jammy

Apparently the band has only recently started exploring the Dead. I found this illustrative interview in (of course) Relix (I corrected the typos, lol):

https://relix.com/articles/detail/king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizard-a-beautiful-mind-fuzz/

During that five-album span, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard also exploded on the live-music circuit, headlining amphitheaters in the U.S. for the first time and aging into the rare torch-receiving act to simultaneously draw in hipster tastemakers, hard-edged metal fans and off-season Phishheads at any given show. It was a long time coming: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have been gradually expanding their own Gizzverse for just over a decade and their rise through the ranks has been singular and organic. In that time, they’ve learned how to make their fans happy—though the group has long staked their claim to one of the more adventurous corners of the jam-scene, recently they have started thinking of themselves as more of a “jamband” than “a band who jams.”

“I didn’t understand the Grateful Dead— they weren’t a cultural phenomenon here like they were in the States,” Mackenzie says, while sitting for a 9 a.m. Zoom at his studio, his two-year-old daughter already awake for the day. “So, early on, when we said we were a jamband, we meant that we had no fucking idea what we were doing. We would just get up there and improvise. The vocabulary wasn’t learned from jambands. But, as soon as we started coming to the States, we noticed that some people would come to every show on the tour. We would always think, ‘I feel so bad for these people. They’re coming to watch the exact same show every night.’ I didn’t realize that they saw this seed of improvisation within our music. I didn’t have access to the cultural understanding of what touring with a band meant. But spending a lot of time in the States opened us up to playing different, unique shows every night and improvising a lot more. And I love that—it makes us feel like we are musicians rather than performers.”

The Gizzard leader says that he will often look back on the group’s past setlists before they return to any given city, in order to offer a unique show. He’s also found himself going down a deep Grateful Dead rabbit hole in recent years.

“As soon as I realized that there were hundreds of versions of the same songs that were all amazing and different, I was like, ‘OK, I get it,’” Mackenzie—who sings and provides guitar, keyboards, flute and a range of other instruments in Gizzard— admits. “When I find a Dead song I like, instead of listening to it over and over again—which is what I do when I find a band that I’m quite obsessive about—I’ll listen to the same song from different years. I said to myself: ‘I understand how this is life for people.’”

I don't really know much about Phish except I've never liked what I've heard, but this Gizzard song (making its live debut last night?) captures what I've always thought Phish sometimes sounds like (at least in my head):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON2YIIPCJr0

btw I'm kinda wondering which records to get, I've got Nonagon and Ice, Death, Planets etc. and I like both of those. I'm more into the band's krautrocky/proggy side than I am the metal stuff

Flying Microtonal Banana

laminated denim very kraut/prog, only 30 minutes but better for it i think.

Omnium Gatherum is a great grab-bag of everything. Polygonwanaland has Crumbling Castle, their great krautprog anthem. KG and LW are great subsequent volumes of their Turkish psych stuff.

cool thanks, I know my local shop has at least one of those

listening to Ice, Death, Planets etc. and I kinda get how they can do so much so fast - it's song based but I suspect like 2/3rds of it is improv. or at least began as improv. that's kinda what Can did I think.

I think their song writing has gotten more complex on recent albums, but yeah, this is basically true.