WAH-WAH squeals, rapid-fire ray-gun zapping, cosmic wave flangers and blues harp shrieking might make great diversions for rock musicians but rarely do they form the bedrock of a band.
Not so with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the fantastically-named Anglesea outfit ramping their psychedelic garage rock to a new level and fresh home after shredding audiences from Iceland to New York in the process.
They’re gadget nuts. No two ways about it.
They love the things – live on stage, in the studio, on their CDs. And with three electric guitars putting their trove of FX to serious space cadet use — on top of hard driving rhythms, rock-solid riffs and catchy tunes — the results are startling.
And pretty damn captivating. If you like a ’60s, Shadows on acid sound, that is.
But fact is there’s a lot to like. And it’s all emanated from an almost inordinately casual, jamming, bedroom-recording MO; so relaxed their work been been called ‘dirty and unashamedly sloppy’, ‘psychedelic warts and all’. In a good way, of course.
The desire of reviewers to tag the band with some cosmic surf superlative seems irresistible.
Fuzz explosion, spaghetti western audiobook, fried theremin-wielding psychopaths, psych-surf – it doesn’t seem to matter, the band laps it all up.
Frontman/guitarist Stu Mackenzie’s not so excitable about categorisations, though. Makes it too easy for a band to be boxed into one style.
“I feel like the band’s changing, and I think that’s okay, because there can be an expectation that a band is just one style and if they change the genre they’re going against what they were originally,” he says.
“It’s all right for a band to be a lot of things. I wish more would.
“Otherwise the expectation is on musicians to put on the same show every night, which I think is absurd. I always wanted the band to be unpredictable.
“On stage, we’ve had a fair bit of room to move in the past .”
That said, King Gizzard remains, at its base, a garage rock band, says Mackenzie. And a band that composes and records as circumstances allow.
Their latest, I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, released after a US-Canada-Europe tour through October and November, is breaking new ground for the lads.
“We’ve done records that have been bedroom recorded or cheaply recorded or not with us all together,” he says.
“Ironically, this one was done the traditional way: write, rehearse and go to the studio and record as a band.
“In that sense, it’s the closest to a live show than anything we’ve done before but we still have a lot of kind of extensions, jams, on stage.
“It’s what turns up at the time. There’s a part that’s not very thought out. You’re constantly stabbing in the dark, trying to do what feels right.”
The album is characteristic Gizzard – popping, squeaking, shrieking, grinding psychedelia — much of it the work of 24-year-old Mackenzie, the band’s chief songwriter from a clutch of many.
The Anglesea songwriter completed music industry studies at RMIT because he didn’t really want to study music as such for fear he might start to dislike the creativity process or trivialise its artistic elements.
He works best in a free form mode and, like many musicians, finds jamming, noodling, dabbling and generally fooling about with music and other musicians produces its most surprising outcomes.
“There’s a magical quality to how a riff is created, how they pop out of nowhere and stick in your head,” he says.
“I guess spending time doing lots of things, messing about with ideas in your head, out they stumble. For some reason your best inventions are often happy accidents.”
Mackenzie’s musical life was almost accidental. As a kid, he was less than impressed with the instruments about the house and his parents musical efforts. A youthful rebel without much of a clue.
“My dad plays guitar, he always had it around the house but I thought it really lame because dad played,” he says.
“He played mostly blues and country acoustic stuff. It was a typical kid thing but it wasn’t until I was about 14 that I started to really love music and realised guitar was cool.”
Then he discovered foot pedals and …. well, the rest is history in the making.
