King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Nonagon Infinity (2016)

From pitchfork.com

Since the advent of digital music, all media players have been outfitted with the Repeat function—whether it’s a button on a traditional CD player, or those circular lines you click on in your iTunes app. I’m willing to bet no one has ever activated this feature on purpose, yet it always seems to mysteriously switch itself on. The effect is always jarring, the contemplative post-listen pause rudely interrupted by an abrupt jump back to the opening track. It’s the ultimate useless proof-of-concept innovation, something that exists simply because it can. But as it turns out, whichever technicians invented this functionality were onto something—because they were effectively preparing us for the advent of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Nonagon Infinity.

Over the course of eight wildly divergent albums, the Melbourne psych-rock septet have fed the past 50 years of rock history through a paper shredder and seamlessly taped the strands back together in intriguing new patterns, even leaving in the parts (bluesy harmonica slobber, flute solos, jazz odysseys) that more cool-conscious retro-rock revivalists would excise. And through experimenting with myriad sounds, they’ve also started experimenting with album formats. Last year’s Quarters! presented four prog-pop suites each clocking at exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds. But Nonagon Infinity ups the high-concept ante to absurd extremes. While pieced together from discretely recorded, separately titled songs, the record is mixed to feel like a continuous 41-minute live performance, complete with recurring musical and lyrical passages. And it’s the first album in history to give you a legitimate, practical reason to hit that Repeat button—*Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening.

But independent of that gambit, *Nonagon Infinity *is the Gizzard’s most ballistic, berserker album to date, a merciless, atomic-bomb erasure of the pastoral terrain traversed by its flower-powered predecessor, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. In their most hot-wired moments (see 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz), King Gizzard have earned copious comparisons to their former label patrons Thee Oh Sees, and here frontman Stu Mackenzie punctuates almost every chord change with an echo-drenched, John Dwyer-esque “wooo” like a dancehall selector pushing the air-horn button. But on Nonagon Infinity, they assume a more mechanistic precision and sinister, metallic force—all the better to reinforce the lyrics’ ’70s sci-fi cartoon-show universe of robots, monsters, and hidden dimensions. Ironically, for an album that functions as a shrine to record-collector rock, *Nonagon Infinity *operates on the same principles as a club DJ set, weaving in and out of different melodic motifs while remaining locked (for the most part) into a propulsive, breakneck rhythm that sounds like Devo riffing on Hawkwind’s “Motorhead.”

When it’s running at peak velocity—which is like, 90 per cent of the time—*Nonagon Infinity *yields some of the most outrageous, exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll in recent memory, on par with modern psych-punk touchstones like Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, Thee Oh Sees’ Carrion Crawler/The Dream and Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse. It’s a preview of what our not-too-distant future of hyperloop travel will feel like—this is a record that requires protective seat belts, induces G-force ripples in your cheeks and drives fingernails into armrest upholstery. But the band’s gonzo attack never overpowers Mackenzie’s psych-pop accessibility, as he spits out a stream of fragmented hooks like a combusting jukebox of British Invasion singles going on the fritz. If anything, his melodic change-ups provide crucial orientation markers on this endless Autobahn of a record. The band also possess an innate sense of knowing just the right moment to switch things up, like with the loose Krautrock boogie that introduces “Mr. Beat,” or the twinned Allman Brothers leads dropped into the “TV Eye”-style surge of “Evil Death Roll,” or the Yes-worthy contoro-riffs that overtake “Invisible Face”. (That said, the incense-scented Santana jam that breaks out partway through the latter piece constitutes the record’s only forced detour.)

Ultimately, the question of how the band will reconcile the chugging, roadhouse-razing closer “Road Train” with the album’s motorik opening proves moot—in Nonagon Infinity’s final minute, the Gizzard effectively bring the former to a dead stop and then just quickly work themselves back up into the album’s familiar high-octane groove. At first, it feels like a bit of a cheat—a switcheroo the band could’ve conceivably dropped at any point in this piece, rather than a natural climax they’re working toward. But the instant Nonagon Infinity resets back to its blitzkrieged beginning, the gimmick’s greater purpose is revealed: this is the first album whose intro actually doubles as its crescendo. And *Nonagon Infinity *is overstuffed with so many stomach-tossing thrills that you’ll actually be jonesing to ride the roller-coaster all over again.