King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: 'Laminated Denim'
Releasing three studio albums within 21 days isn’t something you see from your average band. Nor is having one of them consisting of only two tracks, but breaking the sonic boundaries is as regular an occurrence for King Gizz as is a morning cup of coffee.
The band's fourth release this year, their 22nd in total, is a record birthed from a moment in time that was snatched away by the pandemic; it appears as one of the more mysterious entries into the Lizard Wizard’s highly extensive discography. ‘Laminated Denim’, as it turns out, is an anagram of ‘Made In Timeland’.
The two tracks comprising this cosmic masterpiece are ‘Timeland’ and ‘Smoke And Mirrors’, equilateral at exactly fifteen minutes in length. The original masterplan, devised in 2019 was for these tracks to be performed at a pair of monumental shows at Colorado’s iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Originally booked for May 2020, the shows were conceived as three-hour epics – the first concerts of such length King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard would ever have played. Split into two halves with a fifteen-minute intermission, ‘Made In Timeland’ was to be used as an accompaniment, with a visual countdown transitioning into the second half of the show.
“There was a clock ticking persistently through both tracks, too,” says Stu Mackenzie, chief figure in the Gizzverse. “Thanks to the pandemic, the Red Rocks shows were postponed, and postponed, and postponed. We sat on ‘Made In Timeland’ for so long that we started to get annoyed, and eventually just released it earlier this year.” The album was pressed on vinyl and made available in March 2022 at ‘Return Of The Curse Of Timeland’, a hometown concert where the group finally performed their marathon three-hour set.
Work on this record began midway through the creation of their 21st album, ‘Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava.’ Construction consisted of long group improvisations as the starting point for each of its seven tracks, editing those jams down and composing songs from such protean raw material. “‘Laminated Denim’ was recorded in basically the same way,” says Mackenzie. “We set up with not a lot of ideas, just this ticking clock. We laid down a lot of recordings and ended up stitching it all together.”
‘The Land Before Timeland’, sees lighter shades of percussions with steady jams dripping in effortlessly, with psych-inspired grooves cutting in and out, creating a ‘call and response’ relationship between the guitars and Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s harmonica. ‘Hypertension’, focuses on the darker sonic side the band are known to delve into; endless layered guitar lines feed the track with atmospheric tension, as the vocals swerve in and out of the listener's consciousness, allowing King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard to prove their credibility as a set of artists more than ready to take on an avant-garde, jam-style approach to their recordings.
