Australian Psych Band plays sold out at Bimbo’s 365 Club – CBS San Francisco
By Dave Pehling
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Popular Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard return to San Francisco on Thursday to play an intimate sold-out show at Bimbo’s in North Beach.
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Formed in 2010 in Melbourne, the band fronted by guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Stu Mackenzie has built a fiercely loyal and growing fanbase with their energetic gigs and remarkably prolific production (the band are set to release their 15th album this month- ci and posted a record five in 2017 alone). Comprised of seven friends who all grew up in South East Australia and started jamming together, King Gizzard was born when Mackenzie and company were asked to play a show by a friend and adopted their long and ridiculous nickname.
Hitting a style of reverb-soaked surf-influenced garage rock that echoed the unhinged psychobilly of The Cramps and the propulsive psychedelia of longtime Bay Area heroes Thee Oh Sees, King Gizzard began releasing music with a pair of raw, lo-fi EPs in 2011 (sold out and unavailable Anglesea and Willoughby Beach) before coming out, it’s a slightly more refined first feature film 12 Bar Bruise on the band’s Flightless imprint.
The band would soon establish their unorthodox and prolific ways of working, exploring a variety of styles with the Narrated Spaghetti Western concept album. eyes like the sky in 2013, the milder psychedelic excursions of Float – Fill your lungs (the first King Gizzard album to feature a song written by guitarist Cook Craig) and the simpler psyche of Odds and I’m on your mind Fuzz in 2014.
By this point, the band had already become a popular live attraction beyond their native shores, playing festivals like the Austin Psych Fest, Bonnaroo and Sasquatch. King Gizzard continued to push conceptual boundaries with his recordings, launching the jazzy psychedelic jam collection Quarters! which featured four extended tracks that were exactly ten minutes and ten seconds long in 2015 before the acoustic effort Paper mache dream balloon (their first for the American label ATO) and the ambitious Infinite Nonagonan album designed to be played back and forth in an endless loop that also featured the band’s early experiments with microtones.
The band have only stepped up their activities in the past two years with the release of five separate albums in 2017 (including Turkish-influenced band Flying microtonal bananathe concept album Murder the universe and Polygondwanaland, an effort released as a free download with the band encouraging fans to make and sell CDs and even vinyl copies of the record). King Gizzard continued his prodigious output this year, already releasing the electro blues album Fractured Fish fishing in the spring of 2019 in front of the much more metallic Infest the rats nest which came out a few months later.
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Delving into the band’s affection for classic thrash metal from genre icons Metallica and Slayer as well as more extreme German bands Kreator and Sodom, the effort stands out as King Gizzard’s fiercest display of headbanging riffs in their career.
The band embarked on their biggest US tour to date in support of the album, playing a pair of shows at SVN West on Market Street – the same legendary venue that operated as the Fillmore West and Carousel Ballroom for years. 60 psychedelics. The band had planned an even bigger show at the Greek Theater on the UC Berkeley campus before the pandemic derailed their busy touring plans.
With no live performances or festival appearances for the better part of two years, King Gizzard poured his energies into an onslaught of live and studio recordings, releasing several concert albums as well as a film. concert, a massive compilation of demos, a compilation of the first singles as well as KG and L.W.a pair of albums continuing their exploration of microtonal music, and last year Butterfly 3000.
The band were due to play their own two-night New Year’s Eve festival called Timeland in the small Australian town of Tallarook before a spike in COVID cases fueled by the omicron variant led to the cancellation of the celebration. However, this year King Gizzard ended up releasing Made in timeland (a heart-pounding 30-minute recording that the band planned to play during the festival intermission) before their final epic, Omnium Gatherum. A sprawling double album that some have called the band’s most expansive recording to date, the effort ranges from dizzying 18-minute progressive jam “The Dripping Tap” to experimental metal (“Gaia” and “Predator X”) to psychedelic pop (“Magenta Mountain” and “Kepler-22b”) and many points in between.
The band’s Berkeley date has been postponed until next fall, but playing at this year’s Coachella festival has allowed King Gizzard to branch off and play a number of his own headlining shows in the Bay Area this week. In addition to that sold-out show at North Beach’s 365 club, Bimbo’s, the band will perform an outdoor concert at Gundlach Bundschu Winery in Sonoma and a Wednesday night concert at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma. For these dates, King Gizzard is joined by Oakland-based experimental pop artist Spellling, aka Chrystia “Tia” Cabral, who has released three albums of otherworldly sounds, including last year’s. The spinning wheel for Sacred Bones Records.
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King Gizzard and the Lizard Magician with spelling
Thursday, April 28, 8 p.m. $55 (sold out)
Bimbo’s 365 Club