The one thing you can’t call King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is accessible. For one they’re not on Spotify, having left the platform for political reasons over a year ago. Their 28 album discography has no clear starting point for the uninitiated. Do you start with their microtonal stuff? Or go straight into their most recent release Alien Metal, a techno-garage set split across 8 tracks.
On Sunday they played for 2.5 hours to wrap up the ‘Croxton Block Party’ that they’d put on in the BWS carpark across from the Croxton Bandroom. There were rows of immature gum trees planted between the parking bays that radiated north from the southerly stage as the hot day ended brightly to the west. King Gizz played a few oldies before transitioning into a full techno set, wheeling out a triangular contraption from which four of them could mix at once. Up the back where I was standing people bobbed and nodded and in front of the stage legs and heads flew in a ruckus.
The crowd was as varied as the band themselves, united only by the shared moniker ‘gizzhead’, a type you will know well if you’re a Melbournian between the ages of 16-50. King Gizz doesn’t have very many ‘casual fans’, they have an army of obsessives.
As their set went on and the sun went down I left for a HSP, and ate it by the train line listening to the music echo across Thornbury. Some friends who went the night before told me it was noticeably quiet, but tonight it filled the air for blocks. Rattlesnake was the song that brought me back, like a blind moth. The night was warm, I was so full and tired I wandered back into the show whimsical, like a late trip to the supermarket in your pajamas. The security smiled at me and beckoned me in without checking my wristband, and the atmosphere was as good as it can get on a Sunday evening.
I was drawn deeper into the crowd as their final ‘song’ of the night stretched on and on (it was hard to know where one ended and another began). A freeform jam, referencing other riffs and themes from their catalogue, the last 40 minutes of the set ebbed through metal-arrangements and modular drones to finally settle into a country-and-western motif that stretched into a mournful decrescendo. With the graceful downgoing of the Nile spilling into it’s delta, the set ended finally with a lone guitar strumming out a minor chord that rang out across Thornbury.
King Gizz have earned every bit of their reputation as a challenging alt-art supergroup, but their varied sound and broad scope never cross the line into boring or contrived. They flow seamlessly between sounds, and jam like the greats of the past, and I will remember their performance tonight amongst the greatest I’ve ever seen. Despite my weary legs and tender ears, I walked the 5km home with both headphones in, ignoring the bus. Such was my artistic elation after what has to be one of the greatest displays of musical mastery I have ever seen live.