King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are doing a lot right lately. The Australian psych septet have, in just about six years, released eight albums, dabbling in garage rock, folk, and jazz, before releasing their latest, Nonagon Infinity, just last week. The album sees the band ramming its fuzzy psych stylings through straightforward early ’70s heavy rock, and the “Infinity” half of its title clues the listener in to a neat trick of its construction—the end of its final song loops seamlessly with the beginning of its first, making Nonagaon Infinity one of those rare recordings for which even the most stubborn vinyl-heads will want the digital version. Though us LP die-hards get a treat, too—the vinyl is pressed into a nonagon shape.
The band heralded the LP’s release in March with the release of the elaborate and completely bonkers video “Gamma Knife,” a trippy and mystical video which featured prismatically hued monks committing mass ritual suicide, and which turned the head of no less a personage as famed weirdo filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who actually wrote to the band, saying “I liked a lot, has strength, imagination, sense of colour and rhythm.”
There will be more video where this came from—a video album for Nanagon Infinity is planned for release later this year. The band has already followed up “Gamma Knife” with an even more elaborate video for the song “People Vultures,” and it’s DM’s privilege to debut it for you today. And given that the egg and the riff from the final shot of “Gamma Knife” are the first things you see and hear in “People Vultures,” it’s apparent that the video album may run in a continuous loop as well. Continuing in the Holy Mountainesque vein of “Gamma Knife,” “People Vultures” adds in hat-tips to Tokusatsu TV shows like Kamen Rider, and a production crew of nearly thirty people took three weeks to build the titular vulture prop. Per the video’s co-directors Danny Cohen & Jason Galea:
We conceptualised a giant 6 meter tall musical vulture. The vulture housed all seven band members along with their instruments and trundled across different landscapes fighting various characters plucked from the tracks on Nonagon Infinity.
With the vulture fully assembled and all the band members inside, it weighed over a tonne and was difficult to move safely across the rough terrain without breaking or toppling over. [frontman] Stu [Mackenzie] had the daunting job of being inside the vulture’s neck and head with only a small railing to battle the vertigo and bumps as the vulture slowly moved.
See it, after the jump…
