For a while now, people have been telling me I need to check out Australia\u2019s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. I\u2019ve heard tales of a band who change musical styles more often than Neil Young\u2014and that\u2019s<\/i> quite an accomplishment there.<\/p>\n
So, like I try to do for any artist or band that I know nothing about, I go for the debut releases. In this case, it would be the 2011 independent EP Anglesea<\/i>. Interestingly, band leader Stu Mackenzie says of this release: \u201cDon\u2019t listen to it\u2014it\u2019s fake.\u201d By this, he means he wasn\u2019t 100 percent sure the full lineup took part in its recording. (It wasn\u2019t fake enough to exclude from the 2020 compilation Teenage Gizzard<\/i>, where I listened to these four tracks\u2014but not the whole album. Yet.)<\/p>\n
I have been told many things about Mackenzie and crew. What I was not<\/i> expecting was to hear what was essentially a punk-surf band.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s noisy. It\u2019s crude. It\u2019s unlistenable at times. But… there is a spark of something I can hear that piques my curiosity.<\/p>\n
Look, I\u2019m not going to lie. For a 12-minute EP, this doesn\u2019t really tell anyone much about the band. And, had this been the only thing they ever put out, I\u2019d probably have written them off completely. Recorded on the cheap, as lo-fi as possible, it\u2019s difficult to honestly say that one can hear any seeds of greatness being germinated. The leadoff tracks \u201cEddie Cousin\u201d and \u201cFried\u201d don\u2019t offer up a whole lot of hope for that.<\/p>\n
Then, you get to \u201cGood To Me\u201d and \u201cTomb\/Beach.\u201d It is in these songs where, if you sit and listen closely, you find yourself wondering where this band came from, and how they kicked the band from the previous two songs to the curb. The vocals (which were barely present on the previous two songs) are stronger here, and one gets the idea that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard were finally getting warmed up. Unfortunately, the EP ends there. (The band would follow up later in the year with a second EP, Willoughby\u2019s Beach<\/i>, before releasing their debut full-length album in 2012.)<\/p>\n
Is Anglesea<\/i> a great record? Heavens, no\u2014but there\u2019s enough on the second half of the disc that warrants one to search this out and give it a listen. I know long-time readers will argue that one shouldn’t base an opinion on any artist or band just on their first recorded effort\u2014and I\u2019m certainly not expecting to hear other releases from Mackenzie and crew follow in the exact same pattern. But I\u2019ve heard enough to make me want to keep investigating\u2014something I don\u2019t often say when I rate something the way I\u2019ve rated this disc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[10033],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-47045","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizard","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47045"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47045"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}