King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard at Stubbs
Ben went to see King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard at Stubbs on Wednesday, September 4, 2019. This is what he experienced.
From a vantage point at the front edge of the crowd, raised up by the concrete base of a pillar, I saw everything.
The show opened with a fade into black. Thrashing guitars clawed to life and the infernal hum of the crowd hushed. The darkness enveloped the stage and distorted hell-fire began to lick the backdrop. Enter King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. Clad in frayed shorts and T-shirts, they took up arms against us: a sea of angry denizens there to gut them alive. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Photo Courtesy of the Austin Chronicle
KGATLW latest album, Infest The Rats’ Nest is thrash metal at an epic scale. Utilizing their ever-shifting style to take on the ecopocalypse, Stu and the crew do their best to make their audience lose the last semblance of their sanity in an endless sequence of throat-ripping, terror-inducing stoner rock. The album follows a slew of international headlines about climate change. The headlines— the Amazon rainforest being burned to a crisp by the Brazilian government, the U.N Climate Report giving us a solid fifty years of storm, drought, and famine-filled life left—are mere teasers for the brutal horror film we’ve all been cast in. On a global scale, everything seems to be falling apart, and KGATLW knows it. Nothing prefaces the ship sinking like having the complete shit kicked out of you while a sea of sweaty men and women—young and old—claw and scratch at each other as pits open and screams are heard that sound like the sharks have started circling and there’s nothing left to do but mosh. Infest the Rats’ Nest is a tale of woe written on a cracked ship’s mast bobbing in a choppy, sailless sea.
Photo courtesy of The Austin Chronicle
The noise reached a peak as the Aussies worked the foam out with songs like “Planet B” and “Mars For The Rich”—two bitter tracks that grapple with the reality of wealth-disparity and the soon to be forsaken world we inhabit. The lyrical content verged on hopeless, and this translated into complete mayhem for most of the show. KGATLW kicked us in the teeth. They shook our stupid baby brains into a mush that threatened to come out of our ears. However, there were breaks in the medieval-style violence. Tracks like “The River (Part 1)” off of Quarters! and “The Cruel Millennial” off of Fishing for Fishies brought the buzz of orgasmic build-up and a countryside twang respectively, as well as a much needed respite from the muggy pit for the few who managed to elbow their way through to the edge and beg a drop of water from grinning bartenders. It was there—after fighting my way to an elevated spot at the edge of the pit—where I witnessed pure chaotic rapture.
Every twenty seconds or so, an animal-shaped human would be pulled from the crowd. When the survivors floated their lifeless bodies above their heads, their mosh-sacrificed bodies resembled baroque Christs—mouths agape, hair slick and streaming down the sides of their faces, heads resting on their limp shoulders. It was a beautiful, righteous image, and I lamented them before they awoke and the holy imagery disappeared. A darkness came over their eyes; vanity and lust seized them as they coveted the stage and the performers and screamed with shattered lungs a foghorn of unholy invocations into the eternal black of night.