Nonagon Infinity opens the door – opens the door to what? A mindless frameshift that weaves its way between tracks to give you a uniformly charged melody that never ends.
The psychedelic garage rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have been hard at work in the famed Daptone studios to give us another concept album that drives the wedge deeper between the contemporary and the bizarre.
But you won’t hear Stu Mackenzie crooning like Charles Bradley (or maybe that’s what he’s attempting, in a Wizard way), but you will hear a tighter groove (machine-gun tight at times) and a more rounded sound.
This album is high energy. You’ll be given a few seconds to prepare with a Stu Mackenzie sacrament, and then thrown into the purgatorial waters.
These nine tracks lead you into a psychedelic identity crisis. You’ll be medicated with a sharp awakening of musical normality, just long enough to regain some composure, and then thrown back into the corrupted waters. Rinse and repeat … Ad nauseum.
The timing on this album is all over the place. Even Einstein’s gravitational waves couldn’t bend the timing changes on this album back into a coherent sentence. I’m not going even attempt to explain it – just be aware that the Wizard’s Nonagon will throw your clocks out of time.
The track ‘Gamma Knife’ is the obvious single for this album. It’s slightly more medicated and sedated than the other high-energy ballistic rockers, but even this track still leaves a schizophrenic air irradiating the room.
‘Mr. Beat’ heals the fractured and disturbed psyche with a required dose of optimistic melody and groove before disrupting the reality for the rest of the album.
Nonagon engineers the shuffle and repeat buttons out of existence. Each track formulates like a lost memory, taking each other track’s hook and corrupting it with a mentally disturbed spirit.
A good, but not great concept album from the Melbourne garage/psychedelic rockers.
7/10
Reviewer: Robert Ray