King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

King Gizzard have never been accused of slacking, but 2017 might just be pushing the limits for the band. Flying Microtonal Banana is the first of five proposed albums to be relesed by the end of the year and it booms out with a concept no less. The album is built around member Stu McKenzie’s acquisition of a microtonal guitar. The decision was then made to challenge the rest of the band to acquire instruments operating in microtonal tuning. The band then set out to lay down the workings of Banana. The result is an album that’s still fed on the band’s relentless rhythm, but with the addition of the insturmentation limitations, gives the album a middle-eastern psych quality that’s a nice shift.

Basically the album winds up sounding like King Gizzard as fed through bent psych of Turkish guitar slinger Erkin Koray, the heavy otherworldlinesss of Flower Traveling Band and the North African shuffle of Tinariwen. But its not all just cribbing notes and rolling them in rumble, the band adds plenty of their signature atmosphere to spacey bits on “Melting” and “Sleep Drifter.” They stretch out into a slower slink on “Billabong Valley” which really ups the Middle Eastern aura, adding in Zurna to float the track into a sea of psych vibes. While not quite as overly ambitious as their loop of fury on Nonagon Infinity, this is nonetheless another more academic approach from a band that never ceases to challenge themselves under the guise of limitations. If this is just the tip of the iceberg in 2017, then I’m plenty excited to see what else lies in the coming months.




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