so king gizzard and the wizard lizard have too many albums and while i want to review a lot of them i don’t want to review all of them. i’m going from the “year of the gizz” (2017ish) on. this is because they released i think five albums in the year of the gizz, which is an insane amount of albums to release in a year let alone in less than like, five years. but the boys did it. i think it’s because they probably all wake up and have musician ideas and then record them and bing bang boom that’s a song, but i don’t know what their process is nor do i pretend to. anyway!
NONAGON INFINITY (2016) - 7/10
for any other band this album would be a gimmick. it’s nine tracks that perfectly loop, hence the title. it doesn’t waste time getting into it; robot stop (first track) sets the tone and doesn’t let up. all the songs really sound like continuations of each other. they trade from 4/4 to 7/4 to ¾ to 9/4 pretty seamlessly. i’m not really doing a good job of reviewing this album so much as i am talking about its contents.
nonagon infinity was my introduction to king gizz, and it’s a good place to start because it sort of lays out what you’re going to be in for in all future albums. it has an energy to it that doesn’t let up, gets you very well acquainted with stu’s “WOO!” yells that he tends to pepper songs with, shows off both the double drummers and triple guitars, and sits ambrose’s harmonica parts front and centre where you can really get into them. it’s also messier than their later albums, which i like. favourite songs on this one are gamma knife (which is also my alarm on my phone, so i get a miniature panic attack whenever i hear it), invisible face, road train.
FLYING MICROTONAL BANANA (2017) - 9/10
another gimmick album in any other context, banana is king gizz’s foray into microtones. being neopsychadelica it of course works beautifully. i remember reading about the first song, rattlesnake, and finding out that it’s so long and repetitive because it was meant to usher the listener in to getting used to the microtones. i think it works! it also helps that it’s really groovy. this album has some of my favourite king gizz songs ever on it; i think the only weak one is Sleep Drifter just because it’s such a different mood than the rest of the album. we also get to hear ambrose sing on this one, in billabong valley, which is a fucking treat and a half. the whole album feels cool, i think, is the thing, and i think that’s why i keep coming back to it. that and the cymbals sound really good.
favourite songs on this one are open water, nuclear fusion, billabong valley.
MURDER OF THE UNIVERSE (2017) - 5/10
i don’t have much to say about murder of the universe! it’s a concept album in three parts- the first part is the Altered Beast narrative, second is Lord of Lightning, third is Han-Tyumi. of the three, the last is the best- a story about a cyborg whose goals are to vomit and to die. (he succeeds.) all three parts are accompanied by a spoken word portion, which is… fine? but not as engaging as their other songs. altered beast and lord of lightning especially both sound like they were nonagon infinity off takes that got transformed into something else. it’s not bad, but hearing both albums back to back is a little funny. overall, a perfectly serviceable album, but one of the weaker king gizz ones.
favourite tracks: digital black
i’m skipping over sketches because i didn’t listen to it and i don’t know anything about mild high club except that their band name is kind of bad.
POLYGONDWANALAND (2017) - 9/10
one of my favourites. polygondwanaland is kind of a concept album? but not heavy-handed about it. there’s a few spoken word chunks that feel like they were borrowed from murder of the universe, but i can forgive that i think because this album sounds SO good. it’s got a completely different vibe to it than the other ones, sort of ethereal and fantasy-y. the sort of album you could airbrush on the side of a van and it’d look sick. i like how the songs in this one naturally group themselves together in movements; you have crumbling castle into polygondwanaland into castle in the air into deserted dunes, then inner cell into loyalty into horology, into tetrachromacy to the end. it almost sounds like a couple EPs that got glued together, but they have enough in common that the album as a whole works very well. i just love the mood of this album, what can i say!
favourite tracks: inner cell - loyalty - horology trifecta
GUMBOOT SOUP (2017) - 9/10
i know!!! gumboot soup? nine out of ten? are you insane? and my answer of course is yes to all questions, because i have brain problems and i like this album a lot. it’s sort of the scrap bits from the year of the gizz all collected into one album. no concepts here babey! which is probably good because frankly 4 concept albums in a row is an awful lot.
this album runs the gamut from genre to genre very nicely, showing off all that king gizz has to offer. it starts with an ode to gambling where i’m pretty sure stu just learned a lot about poker terms and got so excited he wrote a song about them. there’s also “great chain of being”, which is the heaviest king gizz song that had been written at that point and which still absolutely shreds ass. and it ends with “the wheel”, which is more jazzy/chill than most of their solo albums and features ambrose’s most sublime vocal performance i think! it’s all a really fun group of songs and i never fail to enjoy listening to it.
favourite tracks: muddy water, the wheel
FISHING FOR FISHIES (2019) - 8/10
it was kind of refreshing that after a year’s break (spent touring, i think) king gizz came back with this of all albums. it’s got three songs whose titles contain the word “boogie”. i think that’s a pretty good indication of the overall vibe of this one. good fun guitar music that’s got a pretty intense environmentalist slant, which isn’t new but is a lot louder this time around. i just like how many shuffles there are in it.
favourite tracks: this thing, cyboogie, the cruel millennial
INFEST THE RATS’ NEST - 9/10
this came out of left field for everybody in a way that i can’t really explain. how do you tell someone that your favourite psych band is putting out a thrash metal album about global warming and space and killing the rich? i guess by saying that. it’s not preachy which is crucial if you’re gonna write an album about social issues, and it’s so much fun to listen to that the cheesiness of some of the lyrics passes by the wayside. you can hear that all these dudes had a fucking blast writing this album. also they’re still fucking around with weird time signatures despite this being thrash, which makes it really weird to mosh to. the last song, incidentally, has one of my favourite like 2 measures in a song ever, and is the sole reason why i pray that the next king gizz album has some sludge in it.
favourite songs: self-immolate, venusian 1, hell
K.G. (2020) - 7/10
the return to microtones! i think a lot of people were surprised that king gizz didn’t stick to the thrash for more than an album, but i guess it makes sense given their pedigree and given that singing thrash is murder on the vocal cords. for some reason though i didn’t get as into this album as i thought i would; the microtonal palate is interesting briefly but they really don’t do as much as they could do with it. you can hear the band’s age in this album. it feels more mature, subdued. though that may also be because it wasn’t something they were able to record physically together due to The Whole Covid Situation, but who knows.
favourite songs: INTRASPORT
L.W. (2021) - 8/10
more microtones, babey! though that makes sense given that this is a companion piece to K.G.. this bad boy has some bangers, all once again with that heavy environmental slant that veers uncomfortably on “preachy” in tone. i get it, we’re fucked! a lot of the songs on this one are more keys-heavy than previous efforts, and there’s a lot more acoustic guitar featured. i don’t really know what to say about this one except that it’s overall pretty solid, but it doesn’t grab me the same way that previous albums have. i think maybe it’s that the band’s as weary of the current times as everyone else is, and it’s showing in their music. or maybe i just want something different from this band nowadays.
there’s one thing in this album that made me put it as an 8 instead of another 7, and that something is the last song, “K.G.L.W.” it’s a companion piece to the first song on K.G. of the same name, and it’s really something. sludgy, dark, nasty, foreboding, and HEAVY. i think it does a better job of communicating the hopeless mood that a lot of the other songs on the album try to convey through lyrical means. i love it and i really really hope that this is more the direction that the band goes towards in the future. if they don’t i won’t be heartbroken, but god damn!!
favourite songs: if not now, when? and K.G.L.W.
that’s it!