Groove Addicts

There's a new King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard song out and it'll probably go down as the most smokin' Australian psychedelic release of the year. Head On/Pill is actually more like two songs wrapped up under the one banner; it's 16 minutes of flower-pop groove realisation, complete with sitar breaks, metronomic double drumming and echoed vocals buried in the deepest hallucinogenic furrow imaginable. It's an aural acid trip to get lost in and by far the boldest statement of intent the band have made. Forget the undercooked (and at times derivative) fuzzy floppiness of their debut 12 Bar Bruise or the frontier cowboy motifs of their second album Eyes Like The Sky, with Float Along – Fill Your Lungs King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have finally arrived. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

For those who are new to the band, the Victorian country kids have never shied away from revealing their influences in their music and they aimed high: Pavement and Thee Oh Sees, amongst others. If that sounds like your thing, until Head On/Pill that's pretty well exactly what you got. Now they've added extra strings (both plainly and figuratively) to their bows, but the fundamentals are still there. It's freaky outsider pop music and where the debut album trod a knife-edge of heard-it-all-before familiarity, their latest release finally establishes the band's voice.

On the impression San Francisco's Thee Oh Sees left on the band, Eric Moore, one half of the KG&TLW beats department, says, “We saw them when they first came out to Australia and they had a pretty big impact.” This impact is there in spades on their debut, but the new record's sonic pedigree is much more diverse. “Everyone obviously had their own taste in music, lots of older stuff like Beatles, Stones – classics,” he says. “Also a lot of the garage stuff, like, the Nuggets and Pebbles comps and all these weird twisted bands from the '60s... I always thought that everyone in the band's got pretty good taste in music and that's pretty important, I think, when it comes to actually being in a band and writing songs.”

The band knew they were onto something special with Head On/Pill. The thing grew out of a 45-minute original jam session that left the collective peaking. “When we finished that song it was like, 'Oh wow!' It was the best thing we thought we'd ever done in a song,” says Moore. But then they had to decide what to do with it. “We talked about putting it at the end of the album but that was pretty obvious and people would probably skip over it. As the first track it's pretty hard to miss. We really wanted people to hear it and not think it's just a long jam that people think is not worth listening to.”

As an album opener, the song asks a heavy question: are you with them or not? Risky business? Maybe. No doubt some fans will resist investing 16 minutes in something that only loosely resembles the music of a band they once knew. But, hey! A western frontier-style concept album was hardly what anyone would've expected for their second LP, and that's exactly what they did. Radio's not gonna touch it, at least outside of the few community broadcasters that have already jumped on board, but that doesn't seem to be the point. What they've managed to do is capture that moment we non-musicians can only dream about, and a lot of bands let slip through their fingers – the moment of spontaneous inception, the point at which a song is created. They've caught the energy of this on tape and laid it out for the world to see, and it's a beautiful thing.

“The first time we played it we just sat on the same kind of groove for, like, 45 minutes and we were just like, 'This is insane!'” continues Moore. “It was like the coolest moment we'd had jamming and we didn't get tired of it and everyone was just in the song... Once you've done it once it's hard to recapture that energy so it took us a lot of tweaking to get it back to that original vibe where everyone was like, 'This is sick!' the whole way through... You can just get lost in it.”

For newcomers, Float Along – Fill Your Lungs is gonna be a solid place to start. If you already know the band, the other songs on the album hinge on elements of the KG&TLW of before but there's a breeziness to it that will further alienate some listeners and no doubt entice others. The sitar popping up throughout gives the songs a decidedly brighter attitude and the used-to-be-a-bit-brittle edges are all smoothed over.

The flow of the album also works. When you make it through the brain melt of the opener the rest of the listen floats along in the afterglow, but there are enough little flecks of colour amongst the quartz to keep you in there. Then there's the six-and-a-bit minutes of the title track closer that ties it all back to the start. It's doable on repeat, and the album as a whole is made to be played live, which is exactly what the band have been doing.

Having now showcased the album in its entirety to a few select audiences around the country, KG&TLW are getting a feel for the responses to the record and Moore says they've been strong so far. “I think a lot of people rock up expecting a massive shitfight but there's a few tamer tracks and stuff,” he says. “I think people are comin' around to 'em.” And coming into summer, soon these numbers will be comin' around to all of us. It's time to get paisley.