Nobody moves faster than King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Today, they’ve released a video for a song (“Invisible Face”) that came out about a year ago, which is a pretty standard thing for a band to do. The only difference is that the album that contains said song (Nonagon Infinity) isn’t King Gizz’s most recent album, nor is it their second most recent. In the first six months of 2017, the band’s already released two albums, and they’ve got plans to drop three more before the year is up. With that breakneck pace, the release of this video for a song that’s eons old by King Gizz standards feels like a deep breath before the baton is passed to the next album.
“Invisible Face” is the third-to-last portion of Nonagon Infinity, which Gizz devotees will remember as an album that’s playable as a continuous loop, each song feeding into the next– even the last into the first, should you choose to play the album on repeat. This track and the one that comes before it, “Evil Death Roll,” both revolve around mathy, krautrock-esque locked grooves and fuzzed out guitars, but the distinctive feature of “Invisible Face” is the chill, jazzy break in its middle. This is what’s interesting about Nonagon Infinity— instead of identifying songs by the breaks in the tracklist, it’s much easier to mentally separate the music according to the distinctive movements that often spill over between arbitrarily-determined “song” boundaries.
True to its form, “Invisible Face” is accompanied by a video that offers a stark divide between the locked groove that bookends the track and the aforementioned jazzy intermission. This is achieved by using the most blatant visual shift available, short of The Wizard of Oz’s black-and-white-to-color transition: an abrupt switch between animation and live-action. There’s a hallucinatory storyline involving guys in monochromatic cloaks, an alligator, a wormhole located in the mouth of some cosmic being, and what looks to be “the Kool-Aid,” but we’ll let you decipher that for yourselves.
The next album in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 2017 tour de force is Sketches of Brunswick East, and although we don’t yet have a release date, we do know that it will be “prominently jazz-based,” as per a recent interview with the band. For now, stream Gizz’s less-than-a-month-old latest, Murder of the Universe.
