(2020) King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Live in San Francisco '16


Review:
Just under a month after delivering their 2016 album Nonagon Infinity, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard took the stage at San Francisco’s The Independent for a set both wildly frenetic and meticulously executed. In one of their final club gigs before bursting onto the international scene — soon selling out amphitheaters and headlining festivals — the Melbourne septet laid down a breakneck performance that, in the words of SF Weekly, “made every organ ache just right.” Newly unearthed by ATO Records, Live in San Francisco ’16 captures an extraordinary moment in the band’s increasingly storied history, a 13-song spectacular likely to leave every listener awestruck and adrenalized.Multi-tracked and impeccably mixed, Live in San Francisco ’16 simultaneously channels the massive energy of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s set while echoing the sweaty intimacy of the 500-capacity venue. Like Nonagon Infinity—the band’s eighth full-length and worldwide breakthrough—Live in San Francisco ’16 kicks off with “Robot Stop,” an immediately transportive track built on blistering riffs and bombastic rhythms. Reaching its majestic climax with a 22-minute rendition of fan favorite “Head On/Pill” (from 2013’s Float Along – Fill Your Lungs), the album rushes forward with a furious intensity as the band tears through the entire set without ever breaking—a feat that induces a sort of joyful delirium in anyone who bears witness. With nearly half the setlist made up of Nonagon Infinity tracks, Live in San Francisco ’16 unfolds with the same exquisitely controlled chaos King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard brought to that arguable masterpiece—a nine-song body of work crafted as the world’s first infinitely looping LP (i.e., each track flowing seamlessly into the next, with the album-closing “Road Train” linking straight back into the opener). “2016 was peak tightness for Gizz,” notes frontman Stu Mackenzie. “Around this time we were really into tightly composed sets, and the show was like one long song—everything linked, everything planned. We threw that idea out the window later on, but this live record is a great document of that moment in our collective psyche.” An unequivocal turning point for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Nonagon Infinity arrived in April 2016 and drew major critical acclaim, with NPR hailing it as “masterfully bizarro” and Pitchfork stating that the album “yields some of the most outrageous, exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll in recent memory.” Not only a critical success, Nonagon Infinity won Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal album at the 2016 ARIA Music Awards, while eternally zeitgeisty director Edgar Wright named it among his favorite records of all time. Two years in the making, the album marked a drastic departure from the folk-and-Tropicalia-tinged psych-pop of its 2015 predecessor Paper Mache Dream Balloon, with the band taking a bold creative leap in its structure. “I wanted to have an album where all these riffs and grooves just kept coming in and out the whole time, so a song wasn’t just a song, it was part of a loop, part of this whole experience where it feels like it doesn’t end and doesn’t need to end,” Mackenzie explained back in 2016. When replicated live, that effect is doubly mesmerizing, as frenzied and transcendent as a glorious fever dream.





Tracklist:
01 - Robot Stip
02 - Hot Water
03 - Big Fig Wasp
04 - Gamma Knife
05 - People-Vultures
06 - Trapdoor
07 - I’m in Your Mind
08 - I’m Not in Your Mind
09 - Cellophane
10 - I’m in Your Mind Fuzz
11 - The River
12 - Evil Death Roll
13 - Head On/Pill


Media Report:
Genre: psychedelic rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits