Band:	King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Album:	PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation
Style:	Garage rock, Psychedelic rock
Release date:	June 16, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Motor Spirit
02. Supercell
03. Converge
04. Witchcraft
05. Gila Monster
06. Dragon
07. Flamethrower
08. Dawn Of Eternal Night [feat. Leah Senior][vinyl bonus]

So here we have an extremely prolific psych rock band creating the Tool version of a thrash metal album about environmental apocalypse.

Despite being around for only a little over a decade, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have released more than twenty full length albums since then, a lot of them conceptual or at least offering something deviating slightly from their core psych/garage rock sound, and last October alone they released three separate albums. We've covered a bunch of their albums recently, but the entire reason why they're on a metal website in the first place is that their psychedelic adventures landed them in thrash metal territories on 2019's Infest The Rats' Nest, the only other album of theirs so far we covered on the main page. It wasn't the only time metal has showed up in King Gizz's discog, with some bits in the wildly varied Omnium Gatherum coming to mind, but it was the only was that was unquestionably a metal album. And I thought it was gonna be a one off-thing, while secretly hoping KG&TLW would return on metal territories.

Well, here we are. Despite the silly title being the most obvious complaint, my first instinct was being afraid that this was gonna turn into Infest The Rats' Nest 2, considering the album has a similar stonery thrash sound and a similar environmental apocalypse concept. And yes, that's a valid observation and most of PetroDragonic Apocalypse is a direct rehash of Infest The Rats' Nest sound and concept. But there's an expansion in both to differentiate, since a story about rich people leaving a dying earth and a story about witches conjuring a giant lizard that turn rogue and uses oil as fuel for splitting flames are a little bit different, and one is sillier than the other. Take a guess which is which. Even with the title and the cover art emanating camp, I'm sure most people are still more interested in the music. And one would probably notice that PetroDragonic Apocalypse is more than ten minutes longer than Infest The Rats' Nest, and that is something that is reflected in the songwriting as well.

There's a lot of thrash metal coating over the entire thing, with riffs and solos especially screaming whenever the pace quickens, and that's a coating that feels applied to something closer to a High On Fire record but done by a tongue-in-cheek band like Gizzy that sprinkle it with their quirkiness, especially in the synth melodies (coalescing into a psybient outro) and in the vocal side. The gruff vocals are really fitting for this kind of muscular metal, but the gang vocals, the throaty chants on "Motor Spirit" or "Dragon" or the Godzilla roleplay on "Gila Mostrer" and the plentiful "Wooooo" moments that don't let us forget who is behind this album. The longer songs, even without reaching ten minutes in length, still feel like they tower over the rest of the record, the jam-nature of the band works well with a longer-form songwriting approach that lands the metal closer to a Tool-ish progressive metal to create a really dynamic sound that flows from song to song even without hitting the brakes too much.

I wouldn't mind more of this kind of "genre tourism", where a band that only flirted with heavier music before gets to showcase an outsider's perspective on a genre. A lot of the guitar playing on PetroDragonic Apocalypse is more of a jammy acid rock kind that is only tangential to metal but feels so well integrated with the muscular metal riffing, and I don't think anybody would've made it gel as well without that outsider's perspective.