A friend of 1BH, who has pretty good musical taste but wasn’t overly familiar with King Gizzard & the Wizard Lizard, was surprised that they had recently sold out the Bristol Beacon within several hours. And surprised how exciting it all looked when showed the reels we had recorded that night. Maybe it’s time for some enlightening words of appreciation!
We all know this band are prolific, and so we all know there’s a lot of material to choose from when you want to listen to them. The 1BH music collection contains more than a few of the LPs, with a few of the more recent ones to catch up on. In fact, our dedication led us to seek the early LPs direct from the band/Australia during Covid. We now need to catch up on the last few LPs and based on the Beacon gig we’ll be doing it soon.
So, why should you love them as much as we do? Well, because there’s always a surprise not that far away and when it arrives, we guarantee it won’t disappoint. Guitars are dispensed with on recent material (and at the start of the Beacon gig – see above pic), and keyboards/electronics deployed instead and yet despite that the quality of song is not diminished.
There’s so much variety to the work and it arrives with you so quickly that you could only listen to King Gizzard and ignore every other band on the planet. This means that depending on what was included on their recent release may largely dictate any gig. We saw them at the Thekla in 2016, Alexandra Palace in 2019 and at End of the Road in 2023, and we would expect no songs played at the Thekla would have been repeated at the Beacon in May. The festival set last year was as near to perfection as you can get in a damp and chilly field in the countryside. And despite it being two hours long it would not have gone over old ground.
The thrashy/metal LP “PetroDragonic….” is not out of place alongside the lighter, more poppy songs of some of the earlier LPs. This writer’s favourite LP is the lighter “Paper Mache….. “, but let’s not get sidetracked, there is an abundance to choose from (including some fab pysch and dreampop moments in the earlier part of the back catalogue). Obviously, a band with so many different styles and the ability to change between them are excellent musicians and no doubt are highly talented. But they enjoy it too! Embarking on a mammoth European and US tour soon, they will give the same level of professionalism and perform with panache throughout. If you haven’t done so already it’s time to get involved.
One Big House 