We Dipped Our Toes In Psychedelic Rock and We’re Never Going Back
It was a black October night and Halloween was only a week away. A strange assemblage of grown adults dressed as zombie-nuns, witches and Waldos bumped and moshed to the music under the watchful eye of a waning crescent moon. Peering through the fluorescent haze of smoke and into the shadowed cavern of the crowd was King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the six-member psychedelic rock band from Australia that dabbles in metal and has churned out four albums this year alone.
I was at their concert in Washington, D.C., a one-night pit stop for the band as they tour the world. That night, I took a soak in their garage rock sound bath and watched King Gizzard skate through a seventeen-song set–a staggering number considering it’s not unusual for their songs to have a 10-minute run time. But what does an immaculately-timed, breathless jam session stoke and inspire in their audience? Animalistic passion. It was a rock show so pure, people tore off their clothes and tossed them into the air. Multiple grown men plunged themselves into a frenzied sea of bodies to practice the ancient tradition of crowd surfing—an art nearly lost if it weren’t for King Gizzard’s conservation efforts.
For the next two hours, I stood on the sidelines, Soccer Mom style, with my feet plastered to The Anthem’s beer drenched floor. The brain-buzzing reverberations of King Gizzard’s microtonal electric guitar elevated me into psychedelic Nirvana. I clutched my Miller Light for dear life as a hypersonic drum beat catapulted me into another space-time continuum. One bandmate ripped his 12-string Stratocaster like it was a chainsaw and another swayed with his bass like it was his first love. Together, they were a mycorrhizal network of musical symbiosis.
The show’s apex arrived without warning: a soul-rattling drum solo set against a digital backdrop of apocalyptic fire. As the first chords of “Self-Immolate” surged to life among the flashing orange glow, I realized that if the building actually went up in flames, we would have thought it was part of the show.
But this was just another day at the office for King Gizzard. Remembering the chords to their 15-minute song “Hypertension” is no doubt their equivalent of recalling an Excel formula on the spot. I actually heard them screech “let’s circle back” into the distorted vocal microphone. Like any 9 to 5, I’m sure melting people’s faces off and shaking the foundations of storied concert venues eventually becomes a grind. Even the most punk rock bassist is in danger of becoming another cog in the musical machine.
But for us, the experience was a picnic under a mushroom parasol; a euphoric plunge into the thick technicolor torrents of a lava lamp. Like a Jackson Pollock painting singing out to us in a flurry of vocal shrills and guitar licks, chaos became harmony. I thought their last song and final word to us would be something high-octane with a sonic power potent enough to induce doomsday itself. Instead, the sextet turned bucolic and gave us a soft rock boogie to sip on as we floated out of the concert, happy and sedated.
WAS IT A CATASTROPHE? No.