- Jason Galea
A healthy lizard will shed its skin two to four times a year, sometimes more. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard keep roughly the same pace, changing their approach, sound, and instrumentation at a dizzying clip. The Australian group was formed by seven close mates in 2010 as a party band with a deliberately silly name, and they’ve released roughly two albums a year since 2012’s 12 Bar Bruise. Their latest, Quarters, is a mellow, zoned-out follow-up to last year’s spastic, brilliant psych-rock exorcism I’m in Your Mind Fuzz. But even the recently released Quarters is old hat already—the shape-shifters have a new acoustic album, Paper Maché Dream Balloon, coming out in November.
For their first-ever Portland show, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard will be playing even newer stuff, which tilts back toward the dark and heavy end of the spectrum. When I speak to ringleader Stu Mackenzie, the band’s getting ready for LA’s FYF Festival: “We’re just having a bit of a jam and getting back in the swing of it. We’re trying to re-learn these songs off of Paper Maché but it’s not really working very well.”
Paper Maché Dream Balloon was meant to be a song-oriented palate cleanser between their more conceptual, jam-oriented work—like Quarters, which contains four tracks that are each precisely 10 minutes and 10 seconds long. Of Quarters, Mackenzie explains, “I’m in Your Mind Fuzz was a real kind of heavy record with lots of energy and yelling and screaming and all that stuff. I wanted to make something that complemented it and was maybe more chill—because as Mind Fuzz goes on, it gets softer, so I wanted Quarters to feel like you could play it directly after and it would almost tie on to the end. So we recorded it pretty much the same way. I wanted it to have songs that are really simple and sort of drag ’em out to an almost kind of monotonous, hypnotic level. That was the idea: Take a song that’s meant to go for two minutes and make it just not stop.”