Photo credit: Dan Ojeda
Stu Mackenzie joked last Saturday about how the busts of Beethoven and Wagner were looking down on his band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Saturday night at The Pabst Theater. But he had more of a point than it may have first seemed.
Over the past decade, guitarist/singer Mackenzie and his six fellow Australians have crafted a prolific artistic corpus on par with the complexity of the Romantic composers whose facsimiles take up the box seats at the Pabst. Working within a realm that expands upon the sonically omnivorous potential of ’60s psychedelic rock may not get them immortalized in bronze, but it did, however, get them signed to Dave Matthews’ ATO Records and able to sell out theaters around the U.S.
The group’s psychedelia incorporates the entrancing elements of the complementary styles folded into their aural tapestries. The overlap of psych and progressive thrash metal arrives courtesy of Mackenzie’s instrumental interplay with guitarists Cook Craig and Joey Walker. Intermittent usage of reverb on their axes offers echoes of instrumental surf music. Rhythmic propulsion from drummer Michael Cavanagh and bassist Lucas Skinner can lend itself to a kind of non-synthetic cosmic disco and the skittery shuffle of drum and bass when not more gingerly applied for other sorts of aural explorations. Depending on the often dour and ominous subject of Mackenzie’s lyrics, which came through acutely Saturday via an especially clean vocal mix, wistful folk and the dramatic flair of film soundtracks are folded into the wizardly mélange.
Some of those elements weren’t prominent at the Pabst as they are in the septet’s discography encompassing roughly 15 albums and EPs, but the band more than compensated with charisma and drive. Early on in their encore-free, 17-song set, Mackenzie called out the names of the songs he and his mates tore through. It didn’t take long for that tactic to give way largely to the group segueing seamlessly from one song to the next. The drew songs mostly through the five long-players they issued throughout an especially ambitious 2017.
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Before immersing the audience into what became a lengthy medley, the band elicited immediate cheers with “Rattlesnake,” arguably their track most ready for a sympathetic club remix. Meeting the challenge of maintaining the intensity of that opening salvo, they decelerated some by the time they bid the audience goodbye by way of “The River,” sounding much like The Doors tussling with War over the same Dave Brubeck charts experimenting with Afro-Latin jazz. Those two numbers and the others between were visually completed by animated shorts, often derived from the songs’ videos and often psychedelic experiences unto themselves.
A band of such aesthetic breadth can go numerous directions to pick a compatible opening act. Amyl and the Sniffers don’t quite cast their net of inspiration as wide as King Gizzard’s, but they still hit a lively bullseye where ’70s proto-punk, glam and pub rock converged into skeezy hedonism. Lead singer Amy Taylor, resembling a fresher-faced iteration of Plasmatics frontwoman Wendy O. Williams, sang gleefully of self-affirmation, sexual fulfillment and generally egocentric pleasure, and she and her backing trio made fast friends with the throng awaiting the night’s headliners.
