Gamma Knife & People-Vultures –

So I was gonna post this album last Monday, but I didn’t get around to recording it before I left. So without further ado…

Nonagon Infinity (2016), by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. An album that controversially won ARIA’s “Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal” album of the year. Was it because it was bad? (Ha! Quite the opposite!) Let’s dive into the infinite loop that is Nonagon.

King Gizzard is a band based out of Melbourne, Australia and consists of 7 members in all (with two drummers no less!). In their short career of only 7 years so far they have released 11 LPs and 2 EPs. This is even more impressive when considering that three albums have come out this year alone, with a proposed two more before the year ends! It’s easy to see the band has a lot of fresh new ideas that they just can’t wait to put down on a record. Each album tends to focus on a single idea or experiment. For example, there was a completely acoustic album recorded on a farm, an entire album played with instruments tuned to microtones (notes that sit between notes, not flats or sharps, think a “one-fourth step”), and a metal album followed by a jazz album. And then there’s Nonagon.

Nonagon Infinity is pretty simple on the surface. Each song leads directly into the next one seamlessly creating this illusion of one long song (especially when later songs call back to melodies heard in a previous song). Several albums have used this idea before (Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is a popular example), but King Gizzard decided to take it one step further. Upon first listening to the album, the listener may be slightly taken aback by the abrupt beginning and end of the album. That is until you play the album on repeat and you realize the last song perfectly bleeds into the first song. This creates the infinite loop hinted at by the title. To top things off, the album has been streaming in its entirety, forever looping on the website http://nonagoninfinity.com/ since its release last year. Located at the bottom of the page is a counter listing how many times the album has looped. When I visited it before writing this, it was somewhere around the 18,470 mark playing the song “People-Vultures”.

The album is also impressively diverse musically. From the hard rock opener “Robot Stop” that makes use of microtones, to the more psychedelic “People-Vultures” with its surrealistic lyrics, to the prog-infused “Mr. Beat” and its leading keyboard parts, to the distinctly jazzy “Invisible Face” featuring a subdued breakdown with congas, to even the metal closer of “Road Train” and its fast power chords. This, however, is the major reason that it stirred up such controversy when it won “Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal” album of the year. With such distinct “non-metal” music backgrounds it was pulling from, hardcore metal fans were upset at the “diluting” of the genre. While I do understand the concern of fans to keep a genre’s sound “pure” and “true” to its roots, music (like art) doesn’t exist within a vacuum, but instead is heavily influenced by the times and the other music around it. Alright, so I may have hesitated in giving it that specific award, but the one thing that is for certain is that Nonagon Infinity is an extremely solid album all-around (even if it is hard to place a genre label on it).

I was extremely fortunate enough to catch the band in a small local bar in Boise only a week ago. They are currently on tour and I would HIGHLY recommend seeing them live. I know I’ll catch another one of their shows as soon as I get the chance 😀