DENVER —
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard dropped a pair of live debuts in their opening show at Red Rocks June 7.
They opened with “Gaia,” and tucked “Motor Spirit” of their forthcoming 24th LP, PetroDragonic Apocalypse, before returning to Gaia to finish it off.
Cbeck out KGLW.net’s full setlist here.
The show started out in heavy metal mode, and the band next played “Superbug,” off 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest but it didn’t seem to matter what genre of music King Gizz opted to play, they still wound up jamming hard, perhaps playing to a Colorado crowd thirsty for such improvisations.
“Sense” off 2015’s Paper Mâché Dream Balloon was bluesy and jammed out deep. The jam highlighted some very psychedelic guitar play and went dark.
Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s chants seemed to egg the jam on even farther.
“No Sense At All”
And Stu quoted “Iron Lung,” calling out to the show’s closer, it turned out.
The three front guitarists moved to synthesizers for “Magenta Mountain,” off 2022’s Omnium Gatherum.
This one was jammed out, too, and unsurprisingly got into deep techno space funk territory before long which flowed right into an equally spaced-out version of “The Grim Reaper,” which features Stu Mackenzie on flute.
The band then went to a pair of songs of 2022’s Changes, which hadn’t been touched until last week during live performances.
A super funky “Astroturf,” highlighted Lucas Harwood’s bass play, and also Cook Craig brought some organ sounds to the mix, while Joey Walker added blues guitar stylings to the end of the song. There were also solos from Mackenzie on the psychedelic flute and Harwood, dropping a funk groove bass solo.
Michael Cavanagh brought his father out on stage before the band performed the live debut of “Hate Dancin’” also off Changes.
“Down the Sink,” off Gumboot Soup hadn’t been played in 75 shows, according to the setlist database at KGLW.net.
Then it was a string of songs that appealed to the darker, heavier side of things, with “The Reticent Raconteur” off 2017’s Murder of the Universe, followed by “The Lord of Lightning,” also off the same LP. That saw some harmonica play from Kenny-Smith,
Three songs straight from 2016’s Nonagon Infinity nearly closed out the show with “Robot Stop,” “Big Fig Wasp,” and “Gamma Knife,” all of which riled the crowd. The “Robot Stop” had “The Dripping Tap,” “Hot Water,” and “Shanghai” quotes.
And even with these louder tunes at the end, the band seemed to take them for longer improvisational, jammy rides out to the Colorado crowd. They also kept up the quotations, dropping “Lord of Lightning” quotes into that “Gamma Knife,” which also saw Cavanagh strike the gong a few times.
They closed the show out with one of their go-tos as of late, “Iron Lung,” off 2022’s Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava. Mackenzie and Walker led this one to start on guitar, searching for that soulful blues that this song always brings out of them. It’s a dynamic song song with parts delicate and loud, and vocals traded off between Mackenzie and the band’s star vocalist, Kenny-Smith.
“Frog breath, steam tent
Neck paralysis”