King Gizzard busted out an apparently only once before played song off their classic 2014 LP I’m In Your Mind Fuzz during their day show at Red Rocks on Thursday, June 8.
“Satan Speeds Up,” had been played maybe only once before. It seemed frontman Stu Mackenzie thought they had played it the year it was released once at a festival. Ambrose Kenny-Smith didn’t have any recollection of it.
KGLW.net, which has a setlist database that is missing some shows between now and then, has no record of the song ever being played before.
So a fairly robust crowd for a Thursday afternoon concert got either only the first or second live performance.
They opened the show a few hours after high noon and played, “The Dripping Tap.”
That’s a pretty energetic and open way to start a show for a good 18 minutes (at least that’s its length on the 2022 LP Omnium Gatherum), but the band took a decidedly loud and dark turn right after, with “Crumbling Castle,” “The Fourth Colour,” “Self-Immolate,” “Converge,” and “Witchcraft,” the last two off the forthcoming LP, PetroDragonic Apocalypse.
If there was the thought that King Gizzard was just going to barrage everyone in attendance with nearly 2 hours of loud thrash metal and the like, the band quickly put that notion away in this spot with the aforementioned, “Satan Speeds Up.”
This slow, Godzilla-sounding psychedelic classic – yes, King Gizzard has put out classic psychedelic LPs and songs already in their fairly young career – was something I hoped to hear on this tour, and the best I knew was that it had never been played before, though I knew KGLW.net’s database could be missing a potential performance. It sounds like it very well has been played once before, and, either way, I know many in attendance were joyed to be catching this one for it’s only first or second time.
The band took a synthy turn with “Shanghai,” off 2021’s Butterfly 3000.
Then they got into the blues, on a train driven by Ambrose Kenny’s Smith’s harmonica, with “This Thing,” off 2019’s Fishing For Fishies, “Most of What I Like,” off 2015’s Paper Mâché Dream Balloon, and “The Wheel,” from 2017’s Gumboot Soup. The band riffed on all of these tunes, and it was the second time in a week that they took “The Wheel” deep.
The volume got cranked back up, with “Evil Death Roll,” which included some quotes from “Iron Lung,” which the band closed with the night before.
But it was “Magma,” off last year’s Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava that finished off this somewhat of a bonus day show.
The band had let the fans know the night before that there would be something special for those that stuck around all day. Several members of the band came out early in the break between shows and introduced the band’s new album, PetroDragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilations Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation.
