King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

Fuck this is good

gonna guess no

it iz it izz

https://vimeo.com/157973501

Guess again
Xpost

I liked Papier Mache Dream Balloon (or w/e it was called) well enough

normally don't trust much from this city, but they're mostly good.

It might be good. I don't regret looking at this thread.

Paper Mache Dream Balloon sounds like 90s Of Montreal, and I love it. Don't understand the drastic change in sound. They want to sound tougher I guess.

Wasn't PMDB the stylistic diversion?

New one is maybe my 2nd favorite album of the year after Black Star.

Spotify really wants me to listen to this

You should, it rules.

Turned up in Pitchfork's overlooked music list about a week ago:

http://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/9910-overlooked-albums-2016/

Wasn't PMDB the stylistic diversion?

yes. nonagon infinity just doubles down on the fidgety, high-energy, garage punk that's their primary through-line so far. one of my 2016 favorites, and i'm surprised it hasn't caught on with fans of tongue-in-cheek prog oddity.

yeah this is great. never listened to any of their other albums

finally listening to this, great! they really got psychedelic ants in their pants

based on this i feel like they'd be really fun live

yeah def seem "high energy"

global have you heard General Baby (local band), has a bit of this vibe but more lo-fi zappa

(it's from that whole larry wish & his guys house show axis that i don't really fully understand)

never heard of em!

General Baby don't even have a web presence, really

oops i guess they used to be fortified five that's why it's hard to find

https://fortifiedfive.bandcamp.com/album/a-brief-demonstration-on-baby-talkin

Ilx doesn't love the gizzards and that's a fact.the last album is very good though.

most recent one (polygondwanaland) is super-proggy and totally rules. these aussie freaks own 2017 imho

this is one of the best bands going rn

I like them

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

Omnium Gatherum is one hell of a record.

That's probably my favorite overall.

Yeah, that one and PetroDragonic are the ones I generally go for, but honestly I sometimes forget which album is which.

These are my favorites (but I have not listened to everything):

Omnium Gatherum
Ice, Death
Butterfly 3000
KG/LW
Flying Microtonal Banana
Mind Fuzz

A better question is whether I have heard anything from them I have outright disliked. I haven't listened to everything, either (by them, or GBV, or the Fall, or ... ), but everything I have heard has been at least enjoyable.

I'm not a fan of Garden Goblin on Omnium Gatherum and it was a real mood killer when they did it live; also I listened to Eyes Like The Sky once and that was enough, though more out of lack of interest than dislike. But otherwise agreed, very few low points in their discography.

Eyes Like The Sky is such an outlier, but I was pretty moved when watching (via YouTube) them play it at Hollywood Bowl as a tribute to Amby's late dad.

I'm falling hard for these guys. Long time coming. When I got into Daniel Romano six years ago, all Dan fans seemed to also love Gizzard, and over the years I would sample new stuff as it came out. I liked Changes and PetroDragonic well enough, I just never felt compelled to replay anything. Turns out one full listen to Omnium Gatherum was all I really needed. I can't get enough of Omnium / PetroDragonic / The Silver Cord / Flight b741 this week. I love how easygoing these guys are in their pursuit of the muse. Sounds like an oxymoron but they seem to have perfected a balance between working hard and taking it easy.

Omnium's like a Gizzard greatest hits, though none of the tracks existed until the album was released.

^ That's fantastic.

Also, reading through this thread keeps cracking me up / nodding passionately in agreement:

I'd look through their discogs list, but I really don't have that kind of spare time...

It's his signature move, kind of like Ryu saying "Hadouken"

Dropping Tap remains astonishing - like a rollercoaster fashioned from prog and krautrock. 17 minutes pass in what feels like seconds.

my other fav on omnium right now is "evilest man." the subject matter of "conservative media" is like .. proceed with caution for me, lol, not something i necessarily want to hear a song about, you know? but i'm all in when it gets to this section:

I wonder if he knows this song
Probably read before it was done
He probably hacked my phone
I'll change the locks when I get home

and after the last line it just blasts off into one of their psych guitar explosions - like it's such a gratifying affirmation of interior personal space in the face of some hall of mirrors nightmare land.

let us not forget that they once cut a concept album that ends with a cyborg vomiting the universe into extinction

...found them huge huge fun and now I just listen to The Dripping Tap all day.

phanton island is out. sounding fan fucking tastic so far. orchestration looks real good on them.

This band rules.

tempted to road trip out to colorado to see them in august. buena vista is a v pretty place.

I took a flight and then road trip to see them at The Gorge last year and it was incredible.

ticket prices are even like not terrible for the back lawn in colorado springs. but then i'd have to go to colorado springs...

i have tickets to see them in 6 weeks in connecticut. very curious if the orchestra will be there for the whole show, or if they'll have a segment of their usual thing (in so far as they have a usual thing lol). never seen them. anyone have any intel?

goddamn this album is off the hook!

disappointed we missed out on tickets for their show at the royal albert hall but we got them for their "rave set" (complete performance of the silver cord).

the new record is top-tier gizz! it's kind of a tear-jerker in places, but constantly scooting between moods. it's very emotionally direct. the beginning of "lonely cosmos" has a very straight-ahead plangent vocal from .. i think that's ambrose? lots of stuff about fatherhood ("eternal return" especially). the mid stretch is so strong and there isn't a less-than-excellent track here. "sea of doubt" is a beautiful song about depression. a lot of moments things seem to be building up to a guitar-rock climax but instead they fake-out into mellow chamber psych-pop. stu's "wooo"s are all stretched out in slow motion. the last song, "grow wings and fly", is exactly what you think it's going to be from the title and god does it TAKE YOU THERE.

they are the best band on earth right now.

oh man i just looked at reviews of this and i feel dumber! someone calls it 'overstuffed.' all of the moment-to-moment ingredients in this are well-considered and contribute to colors and feelings that are the substance of the power of the record! i've listened to it maybe 6-7 times? it took that many listens for the overall picture to focus. it's one of those that for whatever reason.. like my first reaction was amazement at the one-two punch of the first two tracks and then the rest kind of blurred a little bit. but i mean i could pick out any one of these tracks now and just stand in one place agape at what i'm hearing. for starters the lyrics and vocal performances they all deliver are .. it just feels like they pour everything of themselves into them. there are still bits i'm figuring out the words for but it's honestly like .. this is a spiritual sojourn of a record. that might make it uninteresting or sappy to some people i guess. but god this is the peak of a very talented bunch of players and songwriters who are dramatically changing scenes every minute or so .. so the level of the music supports the soul-searching stuff. anyway this is basically my aoty i think. it's certainly made me cry (and laugh!) more than anything else i've heard recently. and there's a section at the very end of "sea of doubt". the song is this consideration of well really an existential crisis, the titular "sea of doubt". the basic gist of the last section is, musically, what would it sound like to be "out of the sea of doubt"? and it sounds like it! it sounds like the feeling i get when i meditate. it's amazing!

I have listened once already but I wasn't concentrating. I will do better.

haha i'm just so psyched on it. i didn't really try with 'silver cord' and i'll be real i haven't even checked out their record from last year. it could just be a right time right place right person kind of thing. i have this feeling now like i HAVE to see them in colorado. like drive out there alone and go be a hippy for a night.

one other thing, about the orchestra - i really love both the orchestration and how it's integrated into the songs. i couldn't imagine a better way for them to pull it off. it feels very next-level musically for them. like it turns the whole thing into an extremely musical experience, if that makes sense. overall it's more comfortingly pretty but their freakier elements are definitely still out in full force, just in conversation with the more musically traditional stuff. there's pedal steel on this on .. 2 tracks i think .. and jeez that's a sound they should use more often. artists the album has reminded me of: van dyke parks, funkadelic, van morrison.

brian wilson! judee sill! haha ok i'll stop.

i've listened to it maybe 6-7 times? it took that many listens for the overall picture to focus. it's one of those that for whatever reason.

Okay, that's great to hear. My first listen was really blurry -- I *was* paying attention but the only thought I had when the album was over, was, "oh that's DENSE," which -- granted -- is a great thought to have about a new album by a band you love. But it felt forbidding.

Flight b741 is my favorite of theirs and they've been saying Phantom Island is a companion piece / direct follow-up. That's technically reason enough for patience, but map's emotional posts are a much better one -- thank you!

hey thanks :). i'm really looking forward to diving in to flight b741 then! also just want to say your posts here have been a real bright spot on ilm since you joined. cheers!

after one run through I am finding it a little overwhelming but i suspect if i give it a couple more listens it's gonna click, the songs and arrangements sound high quality, just dense. i would say it is a continuation of flight b741 in the sense that they are both more classic rock adjacent relative to what i think of as their home base sound of psych/garage, but maybe it's a fools errand to think of them as having a baseline, obviously they have strayed pretty far in just about every direction. i am going to see them in connecticut next month so i will be sure to make the time to get into this album before then, and map your enthusiasm is pumping me up for both that prep and the show itself.

Dense you say? #onethread

characteristically high quality but not as interesting as the latin/cuban album a couple years ago, or that pre-covid mpb/tropicalia thing they did.

kind of has a rock opera feel to it. i feel like they are being intentionally frustrating in places because they're in search of something. or rather they just know that what they're searching for isn't clear. and what they dig up along the way is worth following along for. "there's a light at the end of the tunnel / and the light is soft and subtle"

Thanks map :-)

That's a great couplet. If I have an issue with Gizzard it's that their lyrics lag rather far behind most of my favorite stuff, *but* there are places on Flight b741 that've had me thinking, "ah, but will their lyrics remain substandard for much longer?"

This one feels more in a Zappa/jam (Phish?) mode than some, but I don't like those acts and do like this.

They're so fucking good at what they do, and such a tight band -- after I fell for Flight b741 I happened to revisit an old favorite "choogle" band, One Eleven Heavy -- and 111H *is* excellent too, but god, they sounded stiff as a board compared to the chooglin' Gizz.

The diversity is what originally hooked me. Like, their psych fuzz is legit. Their krautrock is legit. Their metal is legit. Most jam bands seem like poseurs even when they're doing what they do best.

yeah I mean their whole thing is pretty simple actually, they just love playing music. even when they do stuff they're not so good at you appreciate the fact that they tried.

This is less Zappa/phish than it is a (dece) tribute to turn of the 70s rnb stage-pop, all it needs is costumes and dance moves

costumes and dance moves, eh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7t2FL1SRaE

it's been bugging me that i got that couplet wrong - it's 'there's a light at the end of the tunnel / and it appears soft and subtle". anyway this album is still wrecking me. it's not all dense, some of it is disarmingly simple, but the dense sections are unfolding nicely for me.

Goddamit, that's even better

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/24/we-have-a-high-appetite-for-risk-inside-king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizards-historic-eu-tour

I loved this - wish more bands would adopt the same attitude:

But for Mackenzie, it seems more about the sense that every creative whim is worth honouring, and every bit of life really is worth figuring out creatively, indicative of a tendency towards archivism.

but also...they don't rehearse? and they finish the setlist 30 minutes before the show? what if one of them doesn't remember how the song goes?

Jam, lol. Improvise!

One of the more interesting things I read about them is that they really didn't know anything about the US jam bands, not even the Dead, until relatively recently. They just ... follow their bliss?

jam bands aren't a thing at all outside the usa so it'd be pretty unexpected if any of them were a big influence on their approach instead of the krautrock they cite

ya its real cool they're as popular as they are, I mean regardless if you like the music or not they clearly really love to play and are willing to try things. they've got really great stage energy too, I didn't know much of the material they played when I saw them but I did get the feeling that they were willing to extend something out if the audience was feeling it. they seem to attract a lot of people who are in bands themselves, I wonder if that's because they're really living the dream a lot of bands have

This band basically reminds me of Circle if Circle had been normal

they seem to attract a lot of people who are in bands themselves, I wonder if that's because they're really living the dream a lot of bands have

OTM. Back in college, I had a fun two years in a band with a few of my best friends. We broke up when I moved to China but we were silly and passionate and finding Gizzard felt like, "Wow, if our band had stayed together and put 100% effort into the music, isn't this exactly what we would have turned into?" (Give or take respective levels of adventure / talent / genius etc.)

Not surprised that a lot of other musicians would feel the exact same way.

I've not listened to much Ween, but is there fan crossover? I suspect so.

But yeah, the Gizz is so fun partly because they are having so much fun. They Love Music.

jam bands aren't a thing at all outside the usa so it'd be pretty unexpected if any of them were a big influence on their approach instead of the krautrock they cite

They told me a bunch of years ago that they formed as a "dumb Grateful Dead" and were heavily into jamming from the off. I'm not saying they have a top ten favourite performances of Dark Star list in their heads, but I don't think the jam-band phenom is unknown to them - but also, crucially, it doesn't define them.

But also, all this talk of fun shouldn't obscure how excellent their songcraft and performances are becoming! My cutoff for wholehearted interest seems to be around 2021 (I love love love Butterfly 3000, but haven't had luck connecting with the KGLW double) and within those five years since then they've made at least five phenomenal albums, by my reckoning.

That's the thing, I don't like jam bands, not even the Dead, and certainly not their more recent ilk, but I really enjoy King Gizzard. Mostly, I think, because Gizz is tight in a way the Dead is not (and probably not supposed to be) and compellingly creative in a way Phish wants to be (but imo isn't).

This is the Dead-mentioning interview with Stu I read some time ago: 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 ampitheaters 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.’”

“Stu’s not a great sleeper,” Harwood says with a smile, noting that he has just dropped his wife off at work and is preparing to walk his dog. “We will be on tour, or he will get to the studio in the morning, and he will say, ‘Man, I was up until 2 a.m. listening to Grateful Dead. I just couldn’t sleep—I got into this YouTube hole.’”

I think it was really the metal stuff that roped me in. King Gizzard's metal is imo legit, and I can't imagine any other jam band pulling off that authentic love of the genre. Plenty of those jam bands flit around, but it strikes me as somewhat ironic pastiche a la Zappa, which drives me nuts. I think a similar key to a group like (eg) Camper Van Beethoven is that when they do pastiche it's enjoyable to me as more than just taking the piss or a goof. CVB were big Deadheads too, I think/know, but the way the songs and music and playing comes together is special and enjoyable in its own unique way. Maybe that's Stu distinction between "jamband" and "band that jams."