KING GIZZARD
“THIS IS THE MUSIC THAT WE MAKE WHEN WE JUST THROW OUR GUITA RS ON AND NOODLE A ROUND!”
No rock band on Earth is as prolific as King Gizzard &The Lizard Wizard. On their 26th album in 15 years, they’ve captured the sound and the vibe of classic ’70s rock – but with cheap amps and zero pedals. As leader Stu Mackenzie says: “We were just going for the take that had the boogie!”
Words Jonathan Horsley
Photos Maclay Heriot
Just where should the uninitiated start with a band like King Gizzard &The Lizard Wizard, who since forming in 2010 have already spawned 26 studio albums, and whose omnivorous stylistic appetites have led them by the nose through garage rock, psych-rock, synth-driven krautrock, microtonal avant-gardism, heavy metal and prog? This is the band with the creative audacity to conceive of a seven-suite concept album tied to Greek scalar modalities, and went into the studio to record it with little more than that idea in that Lizard Wizard brain of theirs and the determination to jam it out and make it happen.
Well, there’s always a strong case for starting at the beginning. But if you were to pick up their latest, Flightb741, you’d be all right, too, because this recording boils the Gizzard down to its quintessence, a full-flavoured mother sauce offering a taste of exactly where they’re coming from. This is the sound of the Australian sextet returning to the musical womb, a band’s spirit restored to factory settings, playing the sort of ’70s rock and sun-kissed Americana that comes so naturally that it could well be something the central nervous system could take care of.
“We’ve made a lot of records where we’ve challenged ourselves to push outside of what we are comfortable with,” says Stu Mackenzie, the band’s leader, guitarist, vocalist and multiinstrumentalist. “I think we have made some of our most interesting music –the stuff I’m most proud of –in that mode, and that is sometimes the right thing to do. But sometimes the right thing to do is just shoot from the hip and do the gut instinct thing, and that is what this was. On a stylistic level, this is the music that we make when we are warming up. This is the music that we make when we just throw our guitars on and noodle around. It is the music that we are probably jamming on when we are doing a soundcheck.”