Their 26th album, Flight b741 is a jammy delight
by Jeff McCord
In roughly fourteen years, with 25 albums incorporating parallel universes, mutant cyborgs, flesh eating monsters, microtonal tunings, climate apocalypses, online trolls, jazz-like noodlings, glitchy electronics, stoner metal, psych rock, garage rock, krautrock, folk, tropicala and everything in between, what comes next?
If you’re Australia’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, you throw all these high concepts out the window, get in the studio and jam.
Gizzard mastermind Stu Mackenzie speaks rapidly, as if his thoughts are outpacing his voice, which makes sense given the band’s breakneck speed and prodigious planning, recording and touring activity. (They once released five albums in one year.) This is not normal, I say.
He laughs out loud.
“You know,” Stu says, ”on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis? It doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything different. We just haven’t really taken our foot off the gas. We’ve been fortunate enough to not have jobs for quite a while now. So we just do this, man, we put pen to paper as much as we can. The idea is the easy part. Finishing stuff is really hard creatively. That’s the thing that feels like work, finessing ideas is sort of the more boring part. But I live with a fair amount of guilt. Maybe it’s gratitude-based guilt, but I feel very lucky to be here, being able to tour and travel the world and do all this crazy shit that we do. The only way I can feel like I deserve to be here is if I work hard. The guys are all up for the ride as
They must be. In fourteen years, only one original member has departed, the remaining six have been on board since around 2011. Stu admits they’ve been put through the paces at times. well.”
“A lot of stuff that we’ve made has challenged a couple of people. It’s pushed people into a direction which maybe they didn’t grow up in, or maybe they’ve had to adapt to. I’m thinking about the heavier metal records we’ve made, or the more electronic records that have probably been really suited only to a couple of members. A couple of people will be like, ‘whoa, fuck, I need to learn how to do this.’ We’ve made records where we’ve pieced together an album and then thought, ‘Fuck, we have to play this now. This is gonna be really hard.’”
So at some point in the planning for album 26, titled Flight b741 (hey, it makes as much sense as Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava), it was decided; the ultimate goal was to enjoy themselves.
So how did that lead to the greasy Southern-fried jams that populate the new album?
First, they jettisoned all the expensive gear, guitar pedals, and replaced them with cheap amplifiers. And there was a rule: no one could come to the studio with anything but the barest framework of a song. A few chords, that was about it. They wanted to depend on each other, to spontaneously create.
“We couldn’t do that for a long time,” Stu admits. We didn’t have the language to be able to communicate with each other. We didn’t grow up reading sheets, playing jazz. We didn’t grow up with a language of musical communication. We had to learn it orally, and that meant learning how to communicate with each other in 5 or 6 different languages at the same time. Or maybe we’ve invented our own accidentally, but whatever it is, we can play together now. It sounds silly, but we couldn’t play together at the start. We could make recordings and we could get up there and play a show of songs that we’d prearranged. That’s a different thing. So we’re trying to lay a bit more of that down into the records at the moment, because it feels like a little bit of a gift to be able to just have that. It feels like a language. You know, people talk about dying languages. There’s only a few people on the planet that can speak that kind of language. We’ve got this one that we invented, and we’ve got to make sure we record it.”
Flight b741 is just as crazy and absurd, and in its own way, as mind blowing as their other recordings. But it’s easier to absorb. The band claims influences like the early Steve Miller on the new album, but tracks like “Hog Calling Contest” could easily spring from bands like Black Oak, Arkansas. Stu grew up in Australia, yet was raised on Americana. His dad played the guitar, and sang Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel songs to him as a child. Their new universal language encompasses all this. And there’s more. That tedious task of finishing songs? It’s more egalitarian now. When someone got stuck, they simply passed the mic to someone else.
“The passing the mic thing, just trusting everyone’s lyrical and vocal perspectives on their own part, was so great to do,” Stu recalls. “That’s definitely something we will use in the future, something that you throw in the tool belt. This is the thing that could complete the song. That was like a liberating feeling. It was a really nice way to wrap up a record and just think, ‘Wow, everyone’s actually ultra invested in this in every song in this album’. That’s really cool.”
Stu is speaking to me by Zoom from DC, where the band are about to start the first leg of a 40 date US tour (including a stop in Austin on November 15). They’re excited to play these new organically created tracks, and mix them in with their vast and varied discography. All their concept records, they’re fascinating, strange, funny, bizarre. Flight b741 is something else.
“We talked about keeping it loose and free in the studio,” Stu remembers. “In order to do that, we needed to make it fun. We just started to get along. Just have fun, right? It’s something we purely did for us. And that’s awesome. But the nice thing is that most people who have listened to the record have mentioned it, and it’s a beautiful thing that has come across, that feeling has come down the microphone and into people’s ears and that’s really cool. That’s something that I didn’t realize was going to happen. People are perceptive to that stuff. People can tell we’re having fun, and that’s incredible.”
