The five most impressive musical moments of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a band as stuffed full of contradictions as their name is with internal rhymes.
Case in point, on the one hand, they’re a band desperately out of time. One whose sound is influenced by all the least cool parts of hard rock, psychedelia and that anathema of taste, prog. Not even the cool Syd Barrett kind either, the kind of stuff that’d get you laughed out of a Magic: The Gathering tournament for sheer unreconstructed nerdiness.
However, since they also happen to not only be one of the biggest cult bands of their generation, having played literal (tennis) stadium shows in the United States, they’re also one of the coolest. Their absolutely iron-clad commitment to rocking the fuck out allows them to pull off all concepts that would make lesser bands a prime wedgie target with astonishing aplomb. It is truly miraculous the kind of things that being a truly kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll band can help you get away with.
I mean, it’s kind of unfair to call them a kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll band, given all they’ve achieved. With the sheer diversity of their back catalogue, not to mention its mind-boggling depth, they’re a veritable record shop’s worth of different bands. There’s the psychedelic pop mavericks, the thrash metal overlords, the jazz hipsters, the classic rock riff-ologists, and a dozen others besides. It would be easy to write them off as mere dilettantes too if they weren’t so damn good at it.
So, let’s take a look at five moments in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s mammoth discography that show just how much their ambition is genuinely matched with their skill!
Five most impressive King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard tracks:
‘Gamma Knife’
Outside the world of jazz, drum solos are pretty much always dire. There’s a reason that when one pops up in the middle of a gig, it’s never something that the crowd actually asks for. Rather, they are an excuse for tired band members to slip offstage to towel off, bitch about the crowd and do a mid-show line to keep spirits up. At a rock show, they’re rarely anything anyone looks forward to and even less on record, so trust King Gizzard to find a way of making a drum solo (on record, no less) legitimately exciting.
While so much of Gizz’s output is built to show off what frontman, songwriter and all-around head honcho Stu Mackenzie is capable of, ‘Gamma Knife’ belongs to longtime Gizz drummer Michael Cavanagh. He performs an entire extended drum solo on the record in the headscratching time signature of 11/8, and while that might sound like some trainspotter behaviour, at some point you have a throw your hands up and accept that there when a master is at work, then you’ve got to how some respect. The best part of all this? ‘Gamma Knife’ isn’t some album track. It was the first single for Nonagon Infinity. Y’know, the most commercial choice that’ll bring new fans on board. Of course, it was.
‘Head On/Pill’
At this point, if any band tries their hand at psychedelia or progressive music, there are a few inarguable tropes that they’ll have to incorporate. First, at least half of the band will need a beard, or at the very least a comedy moustache. Album covers will have to evolve from moody photos of the band against a brick wall to an airbrushed fantasy landscape that will probably be at its best on the side of a minivan. Most of all, the songs will have to start getting long. Really, really long.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are no strangers to this. Several of their songs breeze past the five-minute mark, and a lot of them easily glide to the ten-minute mark. However, their third album, Float Along—Fill Your Lungs, was where they really set their stall out. Opening track ‘Head On/Pill’ is 16 minutes long and can get even longer in concert. With one memorable live set having a version of the track that incorporated a bunch of other Gizzard classics in it, stretching the song to 45 human minutes long.
‘Planet B’
By August 2019, you’d have been forgiven for thinking you had a handle on what to expect from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. After all, at that point, a Gizz fan would have had 14 albums of fuzzy riffs, spectacular harmonies, and above all, a heaping dose of the unexpected. With albums that go all across the gamut, from krautrock to rap-rock and everything in between, then came Infest The Rats’ Nest, which was not only unexpected because of its commitment to one genre for the whole record, but also for what that genre was: Pure, unfiltered thrash metal.
It was a swing for the fences and (un)holy shit, did it work. In fact, when ‘Planet B’, its raucous, Metallica-indebted opening track, dropped, it was initially just a single. One released before their 14th album, Fishing For Fishies, came out. Even by Gizz standards it was a shocking, out there departure. Since it was also not a song on Fishing For Fishies, the band’s fanbase took this to mean that a whole new album of thunderous thrash was on the way. Certainly fucking was, lads.
‘Omnium Gatherum’
I’m cheating here because while the rest of this list is made up of individual songs, Omnium Gatherum is a studio album. The band’s 20th in 12 years to be exact. With a quite frankly astonishing work ethic rivalled only by Guided By Voices themselves, you stop worrying about if and when they’re going to start running out of ideas pretty quickly. This is a band that reinvents itself all the time from album to album. However, Omnium Gatherum deserves a place on this list as a full studio record because the band are instead reinventing themselves from song to song.
On this record, the band play in a completely different style on every single track. Now, that would be impressive enough if this were a short album, or a Godspeed You! Black Emperor-style hour-long album consisting of three or four tracks. If you learn one thing about King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard from this article, though, it’s that they’re not a band to take those kinds of shortcuts. 16 tracks, 16 completely different genres, 80 minutes of music and utter madness.
‘Deadstick’
Now, anyone who knows King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will be confused now. If we’re talking impressive musical moments, there are dozens and dozens that are more stereotypically “impressive” than this, the second single from their 27th studio album (?!) Phantom Island. After all, ‘Deadstick’ is a fairly straightforward, four-to-the-floor classic rock stomp. It’s got more in common with Status Quo than Tame Impala, so how could this belong on this list? Because ‘Deadstick’ refers to a phenomenon that makes King Gizz such a special band.
For all their experimental freakouts and highbrow artiness, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are always fun. ‘Deadstick’ is just as much an incredible creation as the 45-minute version of ‘Head On/Pill’ because, quite simply, it rips. King Gizz are a band who connect the head and the heart, knowing that true euphoria is achieved by an equal meeting between the two. Sometimes that involves jazz-punk odysseys longer than most Ramones concerts. Sometimes that involves a slice of purest boogie-rock straight out of the Allman Brothers‘ playbook. Both are just as vital, just as exciting, and most of all, just as King Gizz as each other.
