King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard ‘Stick’ The Landing

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard revel in a horn-dominant boogie rock motif on “Deadstick,” the second track to emerge from their 27th album, Phantom Island. The project will be released June 13 through the band’s own (p)doom records label and is a companion to last year’s Flight b741, with the material on both albums having been written simultaneously.

Fans who immerse themselves in the proverbial Gizzverse — wherein continuity exists between the themes and characters from all of the Australian band’s albums — may conclude that “Deadstick” chronicles the crash of the plane at the center of Flight b741. Lyrics such as “panic in the cockpit / praying in the cabin / we’re all holding hands” would seem to support that idea, as does the accompanying, Guy Tyzack-directed video, in which bloody, flight suit-clad group member Ambrose Kenny-Smith awakens amid wreckage.

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“I started off wanting to create a frame that looked like a landscape painting, with many different people and set pieces dotted about,” Tyzack says of the clip. “‘Deadstick’ refers to when a plane propeller stops mid-flight, so I decided to have a massive plane made out of cardboard crash land into a beautiful location. The song is big and chaotic, so then I went about casting swing dancers and eccentric extras to fill the landscape.”

The 10 cuts on Phantom Island find King Gizzard enveloped in elaborate string arrangements and heavy orchestration, a first for the group. “The songs felt like they needed this other energy and color, [and] that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas,” says group member Stu Mackenzie, who enlisted British conductor/arranger/keyboardist Chad Kelly to help flesh out the sound. “He brings this wealth of musical awareness to his chameleon-like arrangements. We come from such different worlds — he plays Mozart and Bach and uses the same harpsichords they did, and tunes them the exact same way. But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”

And while Flight b741 appeared to have earthbound origins, Phantom Island features conflicted narrators singing about their lives in outer space or on alien worlds altogether. “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out,” Mackenzie says, “but as I get older, I’m much more interested in connecting with people.”

Beginning in mid-May, Gizzard will play multi-show residencies in such off-the-beaten-path European venues as a former prison in Vilnius, Lithuania, and a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater in Plovdiv, and in late July, the band will be back in the U.S. for their first-ever shows backed by local symphonies. Perhaps best of all: Gizzard will debut their own festival, Field of Vision, from Aug. 15-17 in the beautiful outdoor setting of Buena Vista, Co., where they will play three distinct sets amid a lineup of friends such as Babe Rainbow, King Stingray and DJ Crenshaw.

The band will then visit Europe in the fall for shows divided between synth-powered “rave sets” and local symphony-backed spotlights on Phantom Island. The tour starts Oct. 31 in Manchester, England, and wraps Nov. 15 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Here are King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s European tour dates:

Oct. 31: Manchester, UK @ Aviva Studios (Rave Set)
Nov. 1-2: London, UK @ Electric Brixton (Rave Set)
Nov. 4: London, UK @ Royal Albert Hall (w/ Covent Garden Sinfonia)
Nov. 5: Paris, FR @ La Seine Musicale (w/  L’Orchestre Lamoureux)
Nov. 6: Tilburg, NL @ 013 (Rave Set)
Nov. 7: Den Bosch, NL @ MAINSTAGE (w/ Sinfonia Rotterdam)
Nov. 9: Gdansk, PL @ Inside Seaside Festival (w/ the Baltic Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra)
Nov. 10: Berlin, DE @ Columbiahalle (Rave Set)
Nov. 11: Prague, CZ @ SaSaZu (Rave Set)
Nov. 12: Vienna, AT @ Gasometer (Rave Set)
Nov. 14: Copenhagen, DK @ Poolen (Rave Set)
Nov. 15: Gothenburg, SE @ Gothenburg Film Studios (Rave Set)

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