SOUNDTRACK: KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD-Polygondwannaland (2017).
KGATLW continued to amaze in 2017 with their fourth record of the year. This record was given away for free in November–it was released under an open source licence—meaning the band did not sell copies of the album, but uploaded the master tapes online, encouraging fans to make their own copies and bootlegs of the album. They wrote:
Make tapes, make CD’s, make records. Ever wanted to start your own record label? GO for it! Employ your mates, press wax, pack boxes. We do not own this record. You do. Go forth, share, enjoy. P.S. If u wanna make cassettes I don’t really know what you would do. Be creative. We did it once but it sounded really shit.
As of 2019, Louder tells us
They put the master tapes and artwork online, and indie labels all over the world filled their boots. According to Discogs there are currently 246 different versions of the album, coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There’s the label who released a triple vinyl 8″ lathe-cut edition of 101 copies. Australian label Rhubarb Recordings released an edition of 500 housed in a reflective silver foil laminated gatefold sleeve with psychedelic UV printing. Pocket Cat Records released a run of 20 with the grooves cut into blank laserdiscs. Aural Pleasure Records used a Kickstarter campaign to fund their edition of five “Glitter Lizard” LPs, with transparent blue and yellow vinyl featuring embedded glitter and “lizards.” It all got a bit crazy out there.
Conventional wisdom would say that obviously if they’re giving it away, it must not be very good. But that’s the surprise (or not, given the quality out put of these guys)–this album is just as good as their others, and in many places better. They really seem to have unified their sound for the bulk of this album, incorporating so many aspects of previous albums, but successfully merging them into a coherent whole. There’s an epic song, a whole bunch of songs that segue into other songs, songs that refer to other songs, loud vocals, quiet vocals, flutes, harmonica, and it’s all wrapped up in an early Pink Floyd-era synth sound.
Album opener “Crumbling Castle” is a ten-minute rocking psychedelic workout. The band has pretty much always had two drummers, but nowhere has it been put to such good use as on this song–where you can really hear them doing separate things that amplify the sound (although the album credits suggest that only one drummer plays on this song, so I guess they were overdubbed and then put to great use live). The song
The rest of the album consists of shorter songs–digestible nuggets which are all around three minutes long.
“Polygondwannaland” is a soft, smooth song with whispered vocals and a compelling riff. The chorus picks things up a bit. Even though I love their more rocking stuff, when they do a grooving song like this (with cool backing synths and the like, it’s magic). It segues seamlessly into “The Castle in the Air” which has a gentle synth and acoustic guitars. It features a narration by Leah Senior who did the narration of Murder of the Universe. I love how much restrain is shown in this song. While Senior speaks in the right ear, the drums are all in the left ear. Later when the right ear’s drums kick in you can hear that both drummers (again, only the one on this song) are tracked wide which is disconcerting and cool. The end of the song really highlights the synthy programmed feel of the song. It’s a rather different sound for them and they embrace it lovingly–like a contemporary Dark Side of the Moon.
“Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet” opens with a ripping bass line which is accompanied by slow, stretched-out vocals. It calls back to the titular track (in lyric and melody) as it alternates between fuzzy guitar and gentle flutes,.
“Inner Cell” plays with some similar riffing but in a different tempo (the tapped percussion is a nice change). The surprising key change about 80 seconds in is nice unexpected jolt. The gentle falsetto in the third part of the song is great, too. This song just builds and builds into awesomeness. It segues into the opening synth pattern of “Loyalty” which morphs into a complex pattern of drums and a smart bass line that propels the song forward with whispered vocals and flute. I love that the back third is separated by a cool-sounding “bass solo”–a riff that runs through the next part before it heads full-steam ahead with guitars feedbacking as it goes.
I don’t know what it is about the picked guitar lines that Stu Mackenzie comes up with, but I think they’re great, like the one that opened “Horology.” Pairing with a slinky funky bass line is a great choice too. When the woodwinds come in and the backing vocals add to the vocal melody it’s a spectacular moment in the album.
“Tetrachromacy” opens with a simple drum beat. But the music is immediately complicated by a gorgeous guitar melody in a different timing. The song builds until it gets a little sinister during the chorus, although the post-chorus section seems much lighter with flutes and harmonica. But throughout the song there’s these rumbling drumrolls that really push the tension of the song. The synth at the end segues into the final short track “Searching…” The synths continue as percussion rhythms join in to create the bulk of the song. The whispered vocals come floating in and then delve into some hocketing–where multiple singers share a single melody, alternating delivery across multiple notes. The band Ohmme used it very dramatically recently. KGATLW is surprisingly understated with it, but it’s still neat.
The searching ends with the manic riff that opens the final song “The Fourth Colour.” This song extends to six minutes on the power of that wild spiraling wonderful riff. It has a few sections including a quiet part where the hocketing resumes. Later in the songs there’s some tremendous harmonies (it’s easy to get so wrapped up in the music and the “gimmicks” of the band that you forget just what great musicians these guys are). The song seems to swirls to a quiet close for a minute until a strange, lengthy drum fill spurs the band into utter chaos for the final minute of the song and album–screams, whoops, feedback and everything else thrown into the conclusion of the disc.
It might be my favorite KGATLW disc of all. And it was the fourth one of the year.
[READ: February 5, 2019] “First Daughters”
This story imagines what would happen if Ivanka trump and Chelsea Clinton had lunch together right now.
It’s technically not trump and Clinton, it is Bianca White and Ainsley Burton, but they are both daughters of two candidates in a recent American presidential election in which the winning candidate Ronald White defeated Marjorie Burton amidst chants for her imprisonment. This election came right after the eight terms of President Black.
So it is a very thinly veiled account of what would happen if these two met again. The motivation for Bianca is somewhat noble: she hoped that she and Ainsley “might restore a sense of equilibrium between their two families that had been lamentably lost over the past two years.” I don’t know anything about Ivanka and I know very little about Chelsea, so I don;t know how much of the backstory is true, but in this version, the two were good friends for many years.
And why not? There were many similarities between them when they first met about a decade ago.
And to be frank, Bianca didn’t really have any friends anymore, so it would be great to get one back.
There’s digs at Bianca’s obvious superficiality (she can’t believe that Ainsley is aging naturally) and her ability to look past the obvious horrible things her father did to Ainsley’s mother during the primaries. Even if she disagreed with some of the things he said, she never spoke out against them. And the fact that she is a shell of a human being and yet was never really scrutinized for anything she did.
So given all of that, what is Ainsley’s incentive to go to this lunch (which is at one of Bianca’s father’s hotels, of all places)? Well, in the one obvious fictitious plot point, Ainsley’s mother has been imprisoned. Bianca’s father’s campaign was so loud about trying to get his rival in prison, that they doggedly pursued criminal charges into the Burton charity. And a White-appointed judge found her guilty and gave her the maximum sentence.
Ainsley came to this lunch in hopes of pleading with Bianca to get Bianca’s father to pardon Ainsley’s mother (even though she felt oddly liberated that her mother was not in her life on a daily basis). This fictional addition would have to be the only way that Chelsea and Ivanka would ever be seen together anymore, I would think.
The story starts from Bianca’s point of view, but the middle is all about Ainsley. Ainsley spent
her entire adult life honing her image as a regular, reasonable, well-regulated kind of person… who could make small talk about neutral subjects like the weather while waiting in line for a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. At times, she’d even come to believe she was that person. Yet if the events of the previous two years had taught Ainsley anything about herself, it was that at heart she was an expletive-hurling geyser of anguish and bile who possessed an overwhelming urge to trip and sucker-punch every asshole who walked by her on the street. [That’s a Chelsea Clinton I’d like to see].
The picture of Ainsley is not all glowing. She doesn’t really like her children, she knows that people think she lives off her family name (but she believes it untrue). She was just named to the board of a Fortune 500 company. In fact, there were four meetings a year for which they paid her a six-figure salary. She is considering running for office some day (her family is a dynasty after all).
But compared to Bianca, Ainsley felt she was a selfless philanthropist. And yet during the election, Bianca (whose crowning achievement to date had been to lend her name to bunch of shoddy handbags sewn in Indonesian sweatshops that paid their workers sixty buck s a month) had somehow been hailed as an entrepreneur and an advocate for female empowerment, while Ainsley’s attempts to raise money to fight cholera had been dismissed as the corrupt flailings of a spoiled daughter in possession of a sinecure.
Ainsley was also upset that her husband didn’t have a job: “was it too much to expect that he go out into the world and forge his own connections separate from the Burton family?” She was also embarrassed that her family’s condo (bought by her parents) spanned an entire city block. But was she really expected to be slumming it? And why had no one ever scolded Bianca for living in $10 million penthouse. [It’s true].
When Biancas”giraffe-like form” emerged from the restroom, Ainsley felt that Bianca’s face looked not unlike “an elongated molded-plastic toilet set in bone.” It wasn’t that she looked like a beautiful woman but more like “the Platonic ideal of one as pictured by a seventh-grade boy.” [Those are both so spot-on it is scary].
Bianca had plans though. After her father was impeached
she was planning to quit both Judaism and Jason, both of which bored her to tears, and move her family and staff to Paris. She had always dreamed of trying her hand at writing a novel.
How will such a doomed lunch end?
At first I found this story so thinly veiled as to be almost fan-fiction for reality. And some of the jokes were obvious (but funny) liberal fantasies, but by the end I thought it was an interesting idea and I think it played out pretty well. Obviously the author is more sympathetic to the Burton side of the story, but she didn’t make out Bianca to be a monster either (even though she might genuinely be one).
I Just Read About That... 
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