Review: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Bristol Beacon – ‘A wildly confusing ride’

Sometimes it’s just best to let music take you wherever it fancies.

Six-piece, Australian psych-adventurers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard seem to have a passport that allows them to venture to all parts and, if tonight at Bristol Beacon is anything to go by, they intend to take as many as they possibly can with them.

It is such a wonderfully, wildly confusing ride that it’s best to just buckle up, keep your eyes and ears open and simply go with the flow.

The view from the balcony – photo: Ursula Billington

To begin with a huge table is wheeled to the centre of the stage. It’s like something you’d expect to see Frankenstein’s Monster strapped to, but it has all manner of sequencers, synths and mysterious electronic boxes ranged across it.

Four (and sometimes five) of the Wizards get seriously boffiny with it.

Their latest, and 25th, album is Silver Cord and for twenty-odd minutes KGLW send the squiggly electronic vibrations from that album thrumming and ricocheting across the hall.

They are sound waves from another planet, techno wooshes and Michael Cavanagh’s astonishing motorik drums, Dr Who rave-head oscillations, the four (sometimes five) bounce excitedly, a multi-headed, sun-baked, Antipodean Delia Derbyshire layering wriggly sheets of sound over and under one another.

Overhead, a projection of the table’s contents cauterises, smearing fuzzy red and yellow.

KGLW in electronic mode – photo: Gavin McNamara

Then they stop. The table is wheeled away, guitars are strapped on and Ambrose Kenny-Smith says it’s “Time for some metal.”

Two minutes ago, the Beacon was a rave den. Now it’s a sweaty thrash metal club: a circle pit opens, twirls and stomps as King Gizzard take more explorers even deeper into their Gizzverse.

Supercell and Organ Farmer are heads-down thrashers – guitars shred, limbs flail. Dragon is a strobing black and white zoetrope of a thing; it’s very fast and heavy, at times recalling Kill ’em All era Metallica. The drums take a savage pounding and Flamethrower grinds away.

Then they stop. Stu Mackenzie throws out a lazy, loping funk groove. The rest of the band lock-in. Joey Walker finds a sax at the side of the stage and Ice V takes shape. A woozy, groovy, sinuous shape, it feels like it could go on forever, a rainbow patterned bubble blown, a beach jam until it morphs into Hypertension.

Thick, viscous psychedelia ebbs from the stage, engulfing everything. There’s a Filmore West intensity, a dark, red velvet suffocation of sound as crescendo after crescendo builds. Most gigs have peaks and troughs; this has peaks and peaks. It’s a full-on psych assault, a determined acid expedition.

The dynamic set included songs from a handful of the band’s 23 albums – photo: Ursula Billington

Work This Time is full of icicle drops, huge, rattling bass and a massive guitar-driven freakout while Pleura swirls with the unhinged delight of an Eastern bazaar. It’s giddying, dizzying, brilliant.

Fan favourite Billabong Valley finishes things off. A sludgy stoner groove explodes around the chorus. Walker eases himself into the crowd and is immediately consumed while he sings, the constant motion looking, for all the world, as though he’s being chewed by hundreds of bodies.

It’s amazing how far you can travel in two hours. King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard seem to have invented time travel, inter-dimensional space travel and some sort of mind travel.

Whatever they’ve done, buckle up and open your eyes and ears. This was such a ride.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

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