SOUNDTRACK: KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD-Live in San Francisco ’16 (2020).
This is a fun show from The Independent in San Francisco on May 25, 2016. It’s on the Nonagon Infinity tour, which means a lot of stuff from that album appears here.
The one irritant is the woman who is a little too close to the soundboard. You can hear her throughout the set, and she’s not exactly an intellectual giant. She shouts, “Why do you have two drummers?” as the show starts. This would be no big deal if it was all you could hear from her.
They album is a series of songs that segue into each other. What I like here is that the first five songs do segue into each other but, while they start with the opening song “Robot Stop,” it segues into 2014’s slower “Hot Water” (from I’m in Your Mind Fuzz). It’s very cool the way their songs keep a similar beat throughout.
They jump right back to Nonagon’s second song “Big Fig Wasp.” From there they continue with Nonagon for two more songs, “Gamma Knife” and “People Vultures.” It’s impressive how tight they are–they can stop and shift gears so seamlessly that they jump between songs as if it were one long song.
After the introductory five songs, they pause a bit. There’s some banter with the audience, but the microphones are distorted and hard to make out. They shift gears somewhat to the mellow Paper Mâché Dream Balloon album. “Trapdoor” is one of he heavier songs on the album, made somewhat heavier here despite the preponderance of flute on it.
Then its back to the I’m in Your Mind Fuzz album. The first four songs segue into each other on the album and they do so here as well. “I’m in Your Mind” shifts into “I’m Not In Your Mind” which features a fun bass-only rumble for about a minute near the end. Stu says, “Hey, smile, you’re on camera,” then they jump right into the catchy “Cellophane” and end with “I’m in Your Mind Fuzz.”
The CD is broken into two short discs (KGATLW have a million albums but but their shows are never terribly long). Disc Two opens with the mellow ten minute “The River” from Quarters.
You can hear the drunk woman shout “yeah, fuck yeah” and then start talking to her friend during the mellow part. Even a curmudgeon like me admits that you can talk between songs, but not during the quiet parts of songs. Come on!
After the mellow song it’s a quick jump back to Nonagon with a ripping “Evil death Roll.” They jam this song out for over five minutes and then begin a mega 22 minute “Head On/Pill” with heavy and quiet parts as well as some classic KGATLW ending moments.
KGATLW put out a lot of records (5 in 2017), so each show tour tends to be very different. This is a nice snapshot from later 2016.
[READ: April 25, 2021] “The Crooked House”
Mull is in a house that is crooked and keeps changing.
When it starts, he has just met the man who claimed to have exited the house by falling into a desert.
Mull had been to many places in the house. He was searching for a woman.
The cafeteria seemed to always have coffee. But passageways were getting blocked and opening in other locations. He could no longer access the cafeteria, but now he could get to the atrium where people often brought hot foods.
It was in the atrium that he met the man who claimed to have left. He said he went to Joshua Tree and got back by hitchhiking–it’s not that far.
Mull had questions (were the trains still running?) but the man’s answers were always vague.
Mull had been in environmental analysis. When the earthquake occurred and the house fell, he was dispatched to the site. It had been almost five months from the first quake to he time when Mull decided he would find Rose Gutiérrez.
It was at the third press conference after the collapse that the assassination attempt occurred. The architect of the house, Quintus Burnham, was shot, but not killed.
Mull had once been at a party with Burnham. He found Burnham to be overbearing. He spoke of hypercubic spatiality and said “you don’t have to understand house to live in it.” Mull thought it was Crypto-scientific nonsense.
It was this cutting edge building that was so destroyed by the earthquake. Some suggest it was Burnham’s ideas that caused the earthquake.
The would-be assassin was Rose Gutiérrez’ son, James, a boy who had once taken a class from Mull. Mull went to speak to him and that’s when James said, “That house swallowed my mother.” Mull told him that the design of the house actually meant that many people didn’t even realize that part of it had collapsed.
But James could hot be placated and told Mull to tell his mother what he had done.
The story gets weirder and weirder as as it goes along, with Mull following men and men following Mull. I never quite figured out what was going on.
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