King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – Nonagon Infinity – 2020

As of the publishing of this post, King Gizzard has released 23 studio albums, 15 live albums, 3 compilation albums, 1 remix album, 3 EPs, 51 singles, and 60 music videos.  It’s daunting to figure out where to begin your journey with this amazing, and amazingly prolific, band.  From the suggestion of a good friend, I began with their 8th studio album released in 2016.  The band is tough to pigeonhole into even a couple of genres, and this album is no different.  Psychedelic, garage, progressive rock, jazz fusion, and heavy metal all fit as descriptors with this non-stop jam.  The album was built from nine songs to be able to be played front-to-back-to-front-to-back in a loop.  Hence the Nonagon Infinity title.  I generally listen to my music as whole albums, and I can tell you they did a masterful job.  It’s easy to get lost in its body moving grooves.

Favorite track: Gamma Knife

The prolific Australian psychedelic pop combo King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard aren't the kind of band prone to repeating themselves. Over the course of their short career, they've established themselves as voracious sonic explorers who aren't afraid to take chances and never met a gimmick they didn't like. In 2015 alone they released Quarters, a jazz-prog epic featuring four songs that were each exactly ten minutes long, and the laid-back summer folk Paper Mâché Dream Balloon, which was recorded on only acoustic instruments. With such a weird and varied track record, their 2016 album, Nonagon Infinity, could have gone just about anywhere and done anything. On it, King Gizzard deliver their best trick yet to go along with their most focused, most ferocious music to date. The album is designed to flow continuously from song to song with no breaks in what the band calls an infinite loop, and unless one is listening very closely it's hard to tell where one song stops and the next begins. To help make the gimmick work, the songs are very similar in energy and approach, with lyrics from one song turning up in another and guitar riffs cycling through from one section to another. The energy level is mainly set to search and destroy throughout as the drums thunder, the lightning-fast guitars slash and burn, and the spacy vocals often break out into ecstatic shouts. The band has added some supercharged Sabbathy metal to its sound, and it works very well. The opening suite of songs punches fast and hard, like someone is slapping you repeatedly with a copy of a Saxon album. It's way more blown-out and weird than that, but you can hear a lot of late-'70s no-frills metal in the sound. The rest of the record is a little more varied, with moments of calm proggy respite, jazz-rock dreaminess, and blown-out psych-pop to balanced the frantic, sustained attack. The way the album is put together is an impressive feat, but almost beside the point since each song within the loop is worthy of standing alone. King Gizzard's inventive sound, giant hooks, and hard-as-titanium playing make Nonagon Infinity not only their best album yet, but maybe the best psych-metal-jazz-prog album ever. That can be debated, but at the very least artists like the Flaming Lips, Ty Segall, and others who think they are doing something cool and weird should check it out and take a few notes.