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08/29/2024

Flight b741: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard // On Abject Fandom, Southern Rock, and Learning to Love the Twang

By TOBIAS WISNER // Probing taste, life changes, Southern Rock, and the Gizzverse in a piece about King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's 26th album in 14 years - Flight b741

Do you ever feel like your life is falling apart at the same time everything seems to be coming together? 

I suppose that’s what periods of great change feel like - the feeling of the world at your fingertips mixed with nerve-wracking anxiety - especially when you’ve either been thrust into an unfamiliar situation or been inspired to make a huge life adjustment that you’re certain (or at least pretty certain) is the right move, you hope to God.

As Brat Summer shifts into a “very demure, very mindful” early fall, I can’t help but feel like that - like the world as I know it is crumbling around me while I can feel in my bones that I’m in a transitionary period that’s set to lead to something better than where I was before - miserable with work, rotting away in a studio apartment in a part of Portland no one likes, the notification that my second DoorDash order of the day was at my door being the main thing I had to look forward to.

Change is scary. Change is also sometimes necessary. Change brings with it completely different life trials and tribulations than you’re typically used to, often at the expense of previously held stability and routine. Unless you’re supported by insane generational wealth and have never wanted for money ever - change can also be very financially taxing. Still, sometimes I think back to the beginning of this year and thank whatever life-giver/higher power that may or may not exist for elevating (or demoting, both are plausible) me from the darker parts of my often turbulent moods.

One thing I know we all seek out during periods of great change is comfort - sameness in a new space. This could be a piece of media you’re addicted to like a show, book, or movie that you obsess over to combat the encroaching existential dread that time marches relentlessly onward and nothing will be the same. For many - this means coming back to a piece of music that you like and playing it over and over again to get a reminder of the good old times. 

I had an old flame tell me once that they listen to The Strokes’s first record, Is This It, during periods of great change, and associate the LP with moves, the ends and beginnings of relationships, and times where it feels like you’re growing. While they understood me on many levels, this was a way that stood out. I often have multiple records I come back to when I’m either happy about the way my life is going or abjectly morose about it. And to focus this piece a bit, those records often comprise works by some of my favorite bands on the planet.

Refer to Music Segue Above

It’s here where I have the act of doing whatever this is to thank as both an emotional focusing device and a coping mechanism. It’s these periods of great change mixed with attempts at comfort that often govern our respective existences - cycles of ebbing and flowing that undulate between certainty and confusion, and sometimes a new record comes along in a favorite band’s catalog that helps one double down on the certainty side. This can be a reminder that everything is going to be ok, the world will keep turning, and there will always be things to appreciate about our lived experience even in times of abject dread.

When it comes to the band I’m going to be talking about today, and this new album they dropped a mere three days before my birthday (happy birthday to me), contending with them and their music means I have to contextualize a lot of things about my own life and musical appreciation.

I’ve been following these guys since high school. They were my first foray into the “weird” of music, music that’s totally out there and unlike anything that’s happening in the scene currently, music that separates you from the pack of the top hit listeners and “Liked Songs” shuffle-people of the world, music that makes you say “What the hell is this?” before it captivates you and suddenly it’s all you’re listening to. I definitely felt that way when I first first heard this band. While I’m older now and only a little bit more over myself, this band is one I’ve honestly been reluctant to tackle up until now.

But, with this new album they’ve dropped, now feels like the right time to dissect a piece of art from one of my favorite bands of all time, all while probing my own feelings, life events, and taste in the process.

In case you couldn’t already tell if you know me - that band is King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and the album I’m canvassing is their newest - their 27th in 14 years - Flight b741.

Enter the Gizzverse

If you’re reading carefully, you’ll probably find that there are about three absurdities in that last sentence. First-time encounters beg questions with no answers upon first glance. What the hell is that name? Wait, 27 albums? You’re an admitted fan and you’re discussing them? Isn’t that biased? 

All of these are valid questions. There’s a reason I’ve tried to avoid using “talking about” when it comes to King Gizzard. This band is so prolific, so strange, and so jaw-droppingly awesome at what they do, they definitely rank highly in my best bands list in my head. However, I’m going to try and be as objective as possible in discussing them. The truth is I’ve been reticent to discuss these guys for fear of the questions no one asked me above, because this band is not perfect. Not every album they put out is perfect by any means. In my mind they do fall on their faces at times in the name of constant experimentation.

In some social cases liking them is a sign of bad taste - some Aussie jam band that probably smokes weed and releases the same thing every album - those uninformed are quick to assign the label of cringe. But I dare you, I double-dog-dare you to ask a Gizz-head where you should start based on your taste, because once you dip your toe into the seemingly ocean-sized pool that is their discography, you’ll want to completely submerge yourself in its waters of many colors, depths, and levels of intensity.

Gizz Context

Ok, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, like so many big bands right now, hail from a land down under. Around 2010 in Melbourne, Australia they were simply a group of friends that jammed together, at this time being mid to late teenagers. Originally fluid in terms of a lineup, the band solidified around Stu Mackenzie (guitar and lead vocals), Ambrose Kenny-Smith (vocals, percussion, harmonica, saxophone, etc.), Cook Craig (rhythm guitar), Joey Walker (lead guitar), Lucas Harwood (bass), and Michael Cavanagh (drums).

In terms of the name, accounts from the band indicate a relative indifference when it comes to where it came from, saying it was probably formed as the result of “some inebriation and a few laughs,” so I can’t tell you much in terms of internet knowledge. What I can tell you is it might have been a stroke of marketing genius to double down on the well-crafted absurdity of it. The name sticks in your head as strange, right?

In terms of the vibe, the only genre I can assign this band that poorly encapsulates what they are is that they’re an experimental Psych-rock band. But it’s truthfully so much more than that - with each release they experiment with new sounds of different genres and musical influences. From Free-jazz to Metal to Garage Rock to Prog to Electronic, to label King Gizzard is to miss the point. 

In terms of their discography, you did read correctly that they’ve put out 26 albums in 14 years. They released five full LPs in 2017. They released three full records in one month in 2022. They have three albums featuring microtonal tuning - rearranging frets on guitars to hit the notes between notes in the traditional Western chromatic scale. They released some of the most critically acclaimed Thrash metal and Prog-metal in both 2019 and 2023 their respective years. They’ve played strictly on acoustic instruments for another album. 

Like I said, trying to pin down what the Gizz is, is to confound what makes this band worth appreciating. Over the course of their prolific career, they’ve touched just about every genre they’ve decided to get their hands on, and they’re whatever they want to be at the moment. The massive fanbase they’ve garnered with their approach to their craft is a sign that a lot of us think it’s cool as fuck.

“King Gizzard Fans Be Like”

Like I mentioned, I discovered this band in high school circa 2014. The album to which I lost my Gizz-ginity was I’m in Your Mind Fuzz, a textbook Psych-garage album featuring a long continuous jam for the first five tracks. At a time where I was mainly listening to electronic music on my tediously curated Soundcloud account, they were a welcome change of pace at the time - an upbeat dose of psychedelia that was weird, danceable, and/or head-bopping. 

I’ve listened religiously to each release they’ve put out since that album. Their 2016 looping album Nonagon Infinity was one of the best rock records put out that year - a breakneck LP that I keep around in CD format in case of any musical outage. 

In the modern era, the band boasts almost two million active listeners on Spotify alone, and they’ve continued to generate fully fleshed out LPs while touring Australia, The U.S., South America, Europe, and Asia. To be objective - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is one of the biggest Rock bands doing it right now. 

This is all to say, I’m an immense fan of this band, and I’m saying this explicitly to be transparent. If you’re looking for someone who absolutely hates King Gizzard, this isn’t the read for you, and that’s ok - you can get whatever opinion you want confirmed online somewhere. Besides, this really isn’t meant to convince you what’s good and what’s bad. My ultimate goal is discourse, and I think, despite my fandom, that I can fairly evaluate my feelings on this record, because despite my occasional gripe, I really do enjoy this latest color of Gizz they’ve decided to paint with.

Gizz-ing Toward the Point

So, what’s this album like? For a band that’s made so many different kinds of music, where else is there to go? On Flight b741, the band set its sights on good old fashioned Rock and Roll with a touch of American/Southern rock - a vibe that I can only describe as Psych-Skynyrd or Psych-CCR, in the King Gizz-iest way possible. 

What does any of that mean? Well, I can point you to a few examples.

For a bunch of Aussies, this record feels like it was brewed straight out of the American South in the ‘60s or ‘70s, a time where bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival were absolutely crushing it and birthed the “FREEBIRD!!!” call out at almost any Rock show we’ve all grown to know as ubiquitous. Something immediately striking is just how high Kenny-Smith’s stylings on harmonica are in the overall mix - eliciting an at times feverish and at other times melodic feeling a la Blues Traveler. The riffs on this thing are crunchy and down-home - perfect for a line-dancing bar or any place where a cowboy hat might be worn - either in jest or unironically.

All that being said - this is NOT a Country record. While many bands and artists are having their country moment right now like Post Malone and Beyoncé, the Southerness of Flight b741 is much more hootenanny than rodeo, much more a club in Nashville than a stadium in Dallas. The Blues-inspired guitars and chugging drums on most of the tracks are evidence that one is meant to boogie down to this LP. No matter where your opinions on songs of the American South lie - one thing undeniable is that this kind of music is just straight up fun, and you can tell King Gizzard had a lot of fun making the record collectively.

For one, group vocals abound on this thing. Lead vocals are traditionally left up to Stu and Ambrose at times, however this record features spoken-word lines from the drummer Cavanagh (“Cavs” for short), belted choruses and verses on the part of lead guitarist, Joey, on top of the already established two singers alluded to previously. It’s as if the band is collectively buying into the lines they’ve drawn for themselves with this one. Rather than be experimental for its own sake, King Gizzard here is demonstrating that they can make good music by using a coloring book as opposed to a blank canvas.

Good thing too, because when the initial singles for this LP dropped - I had to contend with assumptions, preconceived notions, and biases that I’m only just now coming to terms with.

A Former Southern Hater-ade Drinker

To say I, at one time, vehemently opposed listening to anything with any sort of twang to it would be an understatement. The word ‘vehemently’ itself does not convey the sheer contempt for which I held anything that even remotely sounded like Country, and anything adjacent was out of the question. Thank the genre’s semi-traditional and decidedly modern support for right-wing concepts, or the fake cowboys I went to high school with in their lifted trucks that never got a speck of dirt on them - for a younger, admittedly pretentious music fan, Country and Southern Rock were decidedly cringe-worthy.

Trucks and beer, beer and trucks, daisy dukes and domestic abuse, Florida Georgia Line painfully crooning over canned production, Toby Keith waxing “poetically” about red solo cups, total douchebags playing an awful Jason Aldean song on full blast as they went to go cat-call the nearest group of women - these were the things I associated with the Country/Southern vibe. I wouldn’t even go near the stuff. And I wouldn’t for quite some time in my music appreciating career.  

That’s the thing about being young and pretentious though - you learn the hard way that your prejudices about what’s “cool” and what isn’t are often patently false. A lot of the time notions like that have only a limited basis in reality, and looking back I kick myself for being close-minded, myopic, and frankly a dick about other people’s equally valid tastes when it comes to liking stuff with a certain twang.

It took me time to appreciate the outlaw-darkness of Johnny Cash, the beauty of “Neon Moon” by Brooks and Dunn, and the counterculture of Woody Guthrie and Willy Nelson. These names all sell/sold out stadiums for a reason. To twang-y music fans everywhere, I can say nothing but mea culpa, and that I misjudged you.

It isn’t this album that suddenly flipped the switch in me toward loving the uniquely American genre. I’ve been having a bit of an Outlaw Country, Margaritaville-ish summer as it is, but this album certainly helped me double down on the fun of it. And, one thing about this record, is that it definitely is fun - and for that it’s valuable and fun to listen to.

Gizz Gripes

That being said, this thing isn’t a 10/10 by any means, and I do have some things I’d like to mention about this record that leave something to be desired.

For one, there aren’t really any choruses on Flight b741. No big refrains that hook you and make you want to sing along - the band relies on chord progressions and group vocals to make an impact which doesn’t always lend itself to a no-skip piece of work. Not every track is a total banger in some way or form. Some instances see the band doubling down on their jammy-ness that put some people off of the band in the first place.

While this is one of the more accessible albums they’ve made, that accessibility runs counter to some of the experimental elements that push boundaries within Rock music - a chief thing about King Gizzard that I always try to sell people on. Far from being completely cutting-edge, this record is just the Gizz boys having fun with a Southern flair. Is this the album that’s going to convert a Gizz-hater into a Gizz fan? I don’t think so, unless their favorite types of Rock come out of the South and they’re a total Country head in the first place. That has value to me, but this isn’t the be-all-end-all record that I know the band is capable of making.

King Gizzard & The Long Article

So, is this album worth your time? In my mind, it definitely is for both Gizz-veterans and Gizz-neophytes alike. Is it perfect? No. Is it a ripping good time and perfect for a camping trip, a trip to the river, or a BBQ with friends? Absolutely.

Flight b741 is a great start for anyone looking to get into the Gizzverse. It probably won’t change your mind if you think the band is bad in the first place, but great for current enjoyers and Southern Rock fans that already exist. Call it my Caucasian roots or my appreciation for Americana, but this record scratches an itch I’ve had all summer.

While this album isn’t the sole reason I think life is looking up for me as I go through this period of great change, it definitely is a part of a movement, an oeuvre, that things are trending toward the better. I needed a dose of fun as I feel like the world as I know it is ceasing to exist - because what’s on the horizon is even more exciting, albeit scary and uncharted. All that being said, this record is a great cap to a great summer.

Whether or not they decide to put out just this one record this year or several more, this album is a good one. I’m excited to catch this band at Edgefield in Troutdale next week, and I’m even more excited to see the crowd react to tracks off this record as they’re mixed with a microtonal or even Metal setlist. They’re known to mix it up, and my fandom continues for that reason.

To me, this album is definitely worth listening to and one of the better releases of 2024. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. But don’t write this project off just because it’s Southern-inspired. I’ve made that mistake, and you shouldn’t be the one to make it either. 

Listen to this thing if you’ve got the time, or a river trip planned. It’ll be worth your while, and don’t blame me if you fall into the Gizzverse. It’s a good place to be, and you will be welcomed with open arms.

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