A few years ago, the band Graveyard was the big talk of the rock town. Adored by audiences and critics alike they at one point seemed to be the most delicious dish to everyone’s ears – except mine. Not to disparage the band’s musical competence, they were and still are extremely good at what they do both compositionally and performance-wise. But the big blockage for me was their general sound and aesthetic, being such a blatant Zeppelin/Purple-reeking 70s mimic as to only come off as obnoxiously gimmicky. Graveyard are far from alone in this department. The nostalgic clinging to a past “golden era” has been a prominent trend in modern rock music for some time now. Perhaps not always to the same gimmicky degree, but the current state of the genre is nonetheless largely, to quote Anthony Fantano, “at this middle-age point where it’s … reflecting on its past and thinking about how awesome it used to be.”

The first time I turned my ears toward King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, I shrugged them off as just another addition to this trend. Yet a certain charm made me come back. Their retro sensibility wasn’t simply a tired nostalgia trip, but one with a healthy dose of humor and self-awareness. Not only that, but an endless sense of adventurous experimentalism put a twist to the revivalist aesthetic that was centrally neo-oriented. This twist is apparent already on their debut album, 12 Bar Bruise. Compositionally it may sound like no more than classic garage rock, with simple chord progressions, straightforward arrangements and catchy hooks reminiscent of bands like The Kinks and The Who. But added to these compositions are dense layers of distorted and twisted sound effects, resulting in an element of avant-gardistic neo-psychedelia à la The Flaming Lips or Animal Collective.

The neo-twist to King Gizzard’s retro aesthetic contains several layers, one of which has to do with humor. A comparison to vaporwave may prove useful. Along with its offsprings such as future funk and mallsoft, the genre of vaporwave embodies a heavily nostalgic essence, yet one that is filtered through an equally luscious equally DIY a e s t h e t i c that in a memetically post-ironic sense signals an awareness of its own cliché. It is readily apparent in as much their lyrics as their music videos that King Gizzard don’t take themselves too seriously. The amateurishly DIY productions for music videos such as “Cellophane”, “Rattlesnake” and “Trapdoor” display a strong self-aware humor rooted in that very amateurism. Hence, in addition to their revivalism they are also a band of their time, of the era of post-ironic internet meme culture. The existence of king gizzard and the shitpost wizard evidences as much; a YouTube channel dedicated to realizing the meme-ability of all things King Gizzard related.

One strong example of how these two aspects are combined can be heard on “N.G.R.I (Bloodstain)”. In addition to the hippie folk aesthetic that it shares with the rest of the album, the song carries notable influences of 1950s rhythm n’ blues and rock n’ roll. Not least does this come through in the piano, whose steady eighth note pulsation on a high chord is a prevalent arrangement technique in this musical style. But its incessant presence throughout the entire song, and its continuous banging on the same high root chord without ever joining the harmonic progression of the rest of the ensemble, results in a comedic dissonance. While doing the genre justice through genuinely great musicianship, the band at the same time subtly make fun of it. Hence the golden balance between homage and parody that lies at the heart of their revivalist approach.

Yet this is only half of the equation. Through (as aforementioned) experimentalist curiosity, they truly push the “neo-” in neo-revivalism. Each of their albums is to some degree an exploration of new musical territory, many of them conceptually so. Eyes Like the Sky takes the form of a spaghetti western audio book; Quarters! is divided into four tracks that are all exactly ten minutes and ten seconds long; Paper Mâché Dream Balloon consists almost entirely of acoustic instruments; Nonagon Infinity has each track seamlessly leading into the next including the last and first ones, effectively creating an infinitely continuous loop; Flying Microtonal Banana incorporates non-chromatic notes through quarter tone instruments and tunings; Sketches of Brunswick East is a jazz-influenced homage to the Melbourne suburb Brunswick East; Polygondwanaland is a proggy exploration of polyrhythms and odd time signatures.

So in addition to their post-ironically filtered look at the past, they simultaneously keep looking at the future toward new musical horizons. They are quite comparable to Quentin Tarantino in this sense. Tarantino’s filmmaking style (particularly Kill Bill onward) is, similar to vaporwave, marked by post-ironically campy yet genuine cinematic homages – but with a notably modern twist. His expressed love for cinema is always combined with a layer of inventiveness and originality, ultimately transforming the homage into his own very distinct artistic expression. The same couldn’t be more true for King Gizzard.

Also similar to Tarantino, it is impossible to trace the band’s revivalism to any one point of origin. One moment they may be in 1960s garage rock while in another in 1970s prog rock. Although most of the time they tend to be at several disconnected times and places at once. Take “Cellophane” for example: while the track carries the 1970s analogue flair that typically characterizes the band’s production, it is mixed with a 1980s VHS flavor – listen especially to how the bass near the end gives off the type of pitch distortion that is typical for the VHS “sound.” The same goes for its music video, mixing psychedelic animations with VHS grain, as well as some anaglyph 3D for good measure. Other examples include the aforementioned spaghetti western audio book, the pulpy sci-fi of much of their lyrical content, the gothic occultism of the “Gamma Knife” video, or the tokusatsu of the “People-Vultures” video. King Gizzard’s retro aesthetic isn’t so much a linearly revivalist one as it is an anachronistic mishmash of homages and influences.

In summary, King Gizzard view several disparate points of a retro past through the same post-ironic lens, mix them all together into one big hodgepodge, and combine this with a constant exploration of new musical grounds. I am generally not a big fan of the concept of revivalism, whether it be music or anything else. But King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have truly managed to take this concept and turn it into something fun, unique and endlessly exciting.

References:

Fantano, Anthony, “Where the hell is rock going?”, theneedledrop, YouTube, 5/12/2014, <https://youtu.be/MAR7XwtT_M4>