Live Review: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Orb

It's the first time in Perth for Adelaide three-piece Orb who look somewhat awkward on stage, like we've just walked in on them jamming in their living room and they hate us for it. Keen students of Black Sabbath and compelling riffs, they channel the same sort of paranoid swamp-rock grooves that Perth's PUCK do, but without their originality. They seem amiable enough, but Orb need to try harder to stand out from an already packed-out, psych-rock field. 

By contrast, there's nothing even vaguely run-of-the-mill about King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard who've developed enormously since they started visiting the West Coast four years ago, with a stack of records under their collective belt and throngs of young fans. Tonight's set seems to be aimed squarely at them, with the recent chart-smashing Nonagon Infinity album played in its entirety across different sections of the overall set. The explosive, high-tempo start of Robot Stop helter-skeltered straight into Big Fig Wasp without a pause; an indication of the breathless 75-minute journey that lay ahead. Inevitably the radio hit Gamma Knife followed, sending the younger revellers into paroxysms of delight as the area in front of the stage transformed into a polymorphic mass of writhing carnage, charged with berserker moshing and crowd-surfing to boot. Everpresent at the heart of the maelstrom was singer-guitarist-flautist Stu Mackenzie, who's grown into the role of lead man but compromised none of his oddball idiosyncrasies, such as executing random high kicks and chanting like a Dalek throughout the one-word Trapdoor chorus. If there were any casualties on this otherwise euphoric night of bedlam, it was that the quieter, jazzier and more experimental sides of KG&TLW didn't get much of an airing. When they did, through the aforementioned Trapdoor and the technicolour odyssey of The River, they were well-received, suggesting that some more of these sort of ingredients may have been needed to reach an optimal balance.

There was little time for reflection though as with howling harmonica blasts the band clattered through the first four songs of I'm In Your Mind Fuzz with wanton recklessness before finishing the night with the finale of Nonagon Infinity, Road Train, which ratcheted up the tension with double-time drums until the momentum spilled over into one final stamina-testing climax.