KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD - LAMINATED DENIM - KGLW

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard release their new album, Laminated Denim, via KGLW. Laminated Denim is the second of three albums released in October, and follows Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs Mushrooms And Lava, which came out last week. The final album of the series, Changes, will be released on October 28th. King Gizzard also released double album Omnium Gatherum in April, as well as the remix album Butterfly 3001 in January, making 2022 a year of FIVE albums for King Gizzard (a feat they’ve pulled off twice, the last time being in 2017).

An album written specifically with their recent sold-out Red Rocks shows in mind, the tale of Laminated Denim’s gestation is one slightly muddled by the impact of COVID-19 on the band’s touring plans.

“What is Laminated Denim?” you may ask. “Laminated Denim,” explains bandleader Stu Mackenzie, “is an anagram of Made In Timeland,” one of the more mysterious entries in the voluminous Gizzard discography, composed and produced for a specific moment in space and time that, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, never quite happened.

Made In Timeland was composed of two pieces of music – “Timeland” and “Smoke And Mirrors” – both exactly fifteen minutes in length. These tracks were created in 2019 expressly for a planned pair of monumental shows at the famed Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, US. 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. The group foresaw a fifteen minute intermission between the shows’ two 90-minute sets, and wrote Made In Timeland’s two pieces to accompany that intermission, with one of the two tracks playing each night over the PA, while a clock on a video screen counted down to zero and the beginning of the next set.

Thanks to the pandemic, the Red Rocks shows were “postponed, and postponed, and postponed,” says Mackenzie. “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 up 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.

“What is Laminated Denim?” you may ask again. Well, in the immediate aftermath of that Return Of The Curse Of Timeland concert, as thrilled Gizz-fans carried their copies of Made In Timeland home from the gig in their grateful, sweaty little hands, a sense of unease swept over the six members of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. “We suddenly thought, ‘Great – what are we going to do for the intermission at Red Rocks now?’”

The oft-delayed Colorado super-gigs were rescheduled for October 2022, and Mackenzie explains they “basically, we put together an album that was a kind of Made In Timeland Part Two.” Once again, the group conceived two special 15-minute tracks, which would be debuted at the intermissions of the Red Rocks shows.

But Laminated Denim is more than a simple retread of Made In Timeland. Having to take a second shot at the project has offered the group a chance to refine the concept. There are similarities between the two albums but they pushed that original concept much further this time and the band used long group improvisations as the starting point for each of tracks, editing those jams down and composing songs from such protean raw material. “We set up with not a lot of ideas and laid down a lot of recordings and ended up stitching it all together.” The result is more complex and variegated, more abundantly songlike than Made In Timeland.

Having eventually played the two re-scheduled sold-out Red Rocks shows this week, Laminated Denim made its long-delayed debut during the intermissions accompanied by a countdown clock in sync with the tracks. The album was subsequently sold on the merch table, no announcement, in real embroidered denim sleeves designed by Jason Galea.

“We wanted to create a little world around the clock,” Mackenzie says, finally. And perhaps that’s the best answer to the question, “What is Laminated Denim?” – a world of its own, swarming with mysteries, thrills and magic, and a great place to spend half-an-hour in the company of the maverick invention that thrives within the Gizzverse. A great place to get lost, in other words.