Not even a week removed from their last album King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are back with Laminated Denim. They’ve dubbed this the “spiritual successor” to their mysterious and seemingly-cursed 19th album, Made In Timeland, which only just arrived on streaming services after a limited vinyl release earlier this year. Like that record, this new one consists of two 15-minute tracks meant to be debuted as the set-break music for the band’s marathon shows at Colorado’s Red Rocks, and the two titles are anagrams of one another. That’s largely where the similarities between the two end, though.
Timeland is more an art-piece than album; an experimental collage of mostly-electronic music and beats built around the steady ticking of a clock. Laminated Denim, on the other hand, really bears more in common with last week’s Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava, chasing that record’s same improvisational impulse down two new rabbit holes to captivating results.
As on the previous record, these tracks are pieced together and arranged by bandleader Stu Mackenzie from group jams before being augmented with overdubs and vocals, and on Denim the band sound even less encumbered with the idea of traditional songcraft – though they manage to craft a great pair of songs here. The production is more stripped-back, giving the listener an even closer feeling of being in the room with the band as they let loose over familiar stylistic territory. While it might not find them pushing into much new sonic ground, it does illuminate in almost real-time the way that catchy riffs and melodies seem to just pour out of this band. Take the “Teleportality/Teleport you and me” refrain they return to throughout “The Land Before Timeland” or the twin guitar riff that launches in around the 5:35 mark of “Hypertension”. King Gizzard really isn’t the kind of band to get “lost” in a jam and they keep things moving across these 30 minutes, letting each musical idea rise, fall, repeat and reform in their perpetual groove machine.
Laminated Denim’s first track, “The Land Before Timeland” is the gentler of the two, with shimmering guitar harmonies and falsetto vocals over a sunny major-key bounce. At times the jam reaches moments of fluidity that point to further Grateful Dead-ification of King Gizzard, but they just as quickly pull away into something more jagged, and as the song progresses the descending guitar arpeggios and overlapping polyrhythms form into a hypnotic, dreamlike swirl. In its final three minutes, the mood is abruptly broken by a new bassline that shifts things into the somewhat sinister territory, building up into a combined guitar and synthesizer solo with Mackenzie’s vocals eventually floating in, sounding like Tame Impala being sucked into a black hole as the song hurtles towards its ending.
“Hypertension” kicks up a bit more dust, quickly starting off with a more urgent groove and darker, grimier guitars that only grows more high-octane in the jams after the first two verses as the Gizz boys work their way into motorcycle-revving ‘70s rock riffage, channeling a mix of Hawkwind and Molly Hatchet. The aforementioned riff sends them into an extended musical workout that continually builds the tension into a sizzling double guitar solo that only breaks for one more verse before they launch back into an unstoppable freight train of a jam, in true King Gizzard fashion. Ever the masters of the delirious rave-up, the band seems impossible of letting up here, adding in group vocals with the catchy “I caught that hypertension” refrain that only escalates things further. The track is a beast and one of the finest results yet from Gizzard’s jamming ventures.
It may be a minimalist project in the grand scheme of the “Gizzverse”, one that Mackenzie has called “for the fans”, but Laminated Denim is a much stronger record than one might expect going in. The band foregoes experimentation to expand on some of the sounds they do best, and the listener gets to hear the exceptional chemistry of this band at their most free. They’ve never been having so much wanton fun on record, and any fear of the self-indulgence in releasing two fifteen-minute jams is assuaged by their penchant for shapeshifting melody and the energy that relentlessly seeps out. Where Made In Timeland felt perfectly composed as set break music, Laminated Denim’s two songs itch to be performed at full-throttle as King Gizzard whip their crowd into a frenzy, one can only hope they’ll soon make their way into the band’s live repertoire, that is unless their next record makes this all null and void.
