Spotlight: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
“Paper Mâché Dream Balloon was meant to be an anti-concept album,” King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard singer, guitarist and creative director Stu Mackenzie says, somewhat mischievously, while driving through Los Angeles in a crowded van with his hard-hitting Australian psychedelic-rock outfit. “Our last few records have been more conceptual, but for this one, we tried to write songs that were just songs, as opposed to making these pieces that were meant to express something specific.”
Mackenzie and his troupe are in the States gearing up for the November release of Paper Mâché Dream Balloon, their seventh full-length in five years and first for ATO Records, but they also have their eyes firmly planted on King Gizzard’s next album—a dark, proggy, magical mystery tour due out in 2016. The seven-piece ensemble was actually developing that batch of heavy songs—reminiscent of their Stooges–meets-early-Grateful Dead live show—when they abruptly changed course and recorded Paper Mâché entirely on acoustic instruments.
“We started messing around with simpler, more traditional songwriting ideas that weren’t related thematically,” he says of the Paper Mâché sessions, stopping just short of describing the release as their answer to Workingman’s Dead. “Once we came up with the all-acoustic album theme, it quickly took shape. We recorded it over a few months, sort of lazily in different spots, so everyone could listen and mess around with different ideas.”
The members of King Gizzard set up shop and laid down much of the album in an old, empty shipping container parked on Mackenzie’s parents’ farm in Victoria, outside Melbourne. Stripping their expansive sound down to its essence, the band set aside their fuzzy electric riffs, swirling organs and muscular drum fills in favor of acoustic guitars, flute, double bass, fiddle, harmonica and clarinet.
For a large psych-rock band that only really started gaining traction in the U.S. during a marathon run of shows at New York’s CMJ last fall, the somewhat abrupt change in direction may seem like a gamble. But the members of King Gizzard actually see the stylistic left turn as part of their original concept.
Mackenzie, drummer/ percussionist Eric Moore and bassist/guitarist Joey Walker originally formed King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard as a loose, garage-rock side-project to play parties around their native Melbourne between gigs with their proper bands. “It was just meant to be very open, no pressure whatsoever,” Mackenzie says of their formative years. “Once we started making records, it evolved.”
King Gizzard’s initial vision was to jam out seemingly simple songs, and their proper debut, 12 Bar Bruise reflects those raw garage roots. After releasing the more experimental number “Head On/Pill” in 2013, the band gradually loosened their punk-rock bite by incorporating ‘60s-inspired, art-rock elements.
“After we made ‘Head On/ Pill,’ we started to get a little more jammy and psychedelic with Float Along – Fill Your Lungs,” says Moore, who also handles the band’s management duties. “Stu wrote the music and recorded it as a soundtrack to a story, and then, [harmonica player] Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s dad, who’s a musician in Australia, wrote an actual story and narrated the whole record.”
Early on, King Gizzard set the ambitious goal of releasing two albums a year. So far, they’ve managed to live up to their promise, regularly popping into different studios while barnstorming across the U.S., Europe and Australia. They temporarily relocated to New York for two months in 2015, establishing the indie club Baby’s All Right as their home base and forging a close relationship with Brooklyn, N.Y.’s famed Daptone Records, where they recorded a good chunk of 2014’s trippy I’m in Your Mind Fuzz.
“We love Daptone and their awesome engineer, Wayne Gordon, so we came back a few months later, and that’s kind of how Quarters! came together,” Moore says of their other 2015 release. “Wayne’s a genius with tape. We recorded Quarters! with him at Daptone, and we also used our own high-end recording set-up in Melbourne. We’re going into a different studio in New York with him this fall to work on this heavier record, which should be fun.”
Though Kind Gizzard are riding the crest of Australia’s current psychedelic-rock boom, they are still determined not to pigeonhole themselves into one particular style. In fact, while Paper Mâché‘s rootsier sound, lush orchestration and Their Satanic Majesties Request twist on psychedelia will likely net the group a wider audience, they are already thinking of ways to appease fans of their extended jam sessions and punishing grooves.
“I feel like we’re still a garage band,” Mackenzie says with a prankster smile. “That’s still the spirit of the band. But Paper Mâché is more about thinking about music than playing music. It is still a conceptual piece, but it’s also a head fuck.”
