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Every music enjoyer has 'the list' of projects/arists/albums/etc. that they need to check out at some stage. My list is ever-growing because I tend to wallow in the music I have already heard and decided I like and rarely give new things a try, despite how many good things I may have heard.
One such band I have heard many good things about is the Australian rock band 'King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard'. I had been given what I assume to be the usual spiel from a friend of mine a few years ago, talking about their frequent genre shifts, eclectic instrumentation, and even use of microtonal music in some songs. I was certainly intrigued, but I never actually went and listened to anything they had made. What finally pushed me to listen to some of their work was when I was going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and ended up on the article about their album 'Nonagon Infinity'. I had heard about this album and its defining characteristics before, but what caught me off-guard was a paragraph quoting Edgar Wright (one of my favourite film directors) as saying it was one of his favourite albums of all time.
THAT certainly got my attention. And the next thing I knew, five hours had passed and the album was in my bandcamp collection.
Nonagon Infinity is a nine-track psychedelic rock album, but that description doesn't do it justice. I feel it would be more apt to say that it is a ~40 minute epic which happens to be split into nine pieces. This album's defining feature (okay let's be honest with ourselves, it's a gimmick) is that all the songs are written and produced to flow into each other in such a way that the whole album can be played on repeat indefinitely. This is something I was initially skeptical of when I first heard it described, but the band doubled-down on this concept to make it work. The transitions in the production work well and the songs share verses and themes/motifs to tie them together into a cohesive whole, rather than a collection of tracks.
The production itself has a more lo-fi, 70's-esque saturated feel. This may come across to some listeners as sounding dirty or muddy, but I think it's done tastefully here to help the un-hinged feeling of many of these songs like 'Robot Stop' and 'Road Train'. The music itself could be described genre-wise as a fusion of psychedelic rock, garage rock, with some elements of jazz fusion and even heavy metal at some moments. This blend of different sounds combined with the noisy production and looping nature of the album makes you feel like you're on a never-ending ride on a crazy train.
If I had to say I had a problem with this album, it would be that I don't find many of the songs here to be particularly enjoyable on their own. I certainly wouldn't call them bad, but they aren't something I would listen to divorced from the rest of the album. After all, what's the point of gathering the ingredients to bake some cookies if all you're going to eat are the chocolate chips? Ultimately, I don't consider this a big issue as the whole point of these songs is that they form a long multi-movement piece of music.
Of course, the danger of basing your project on such a meta concept as having nine songs that flow into each other is risky. Focusing too much on an idea like this can mean you neglect more fundamental aspects of your music. For example, I could write a piece of music that uses a bunch of shepard tones to create the illusion of the music constantly rising, release a ten second fragment of that and then instruct the listeners to play it on repeat, and I will have made a piece of music that "lasts forever". But that doesn't mean I made it sound good. Nonagon Infinity avoids this trap, as it is full of catchy and memorable lyrics, riffs, and melodies. Some examples include the recurring phrase "Nonagon Infinity opens the door", the opening guitar melody on the track 'People-Vultures', and the vocal melody in the chorus of 'Mr Beat'.
Overall, Nonagon Infinity is an album that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to one or two songs in isolation will not give you the proper experience, but this is more than made-up for by the bigger picture they form together. I've been listening to this record almost non-stop lately and I'm not sure how I managed to live without it for so long. I am certainly going to be looking deeper into King Gizzard's discography.
Eventually.