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Hello fellow Sorry Staters! You made it to the next volume of the newsletter in my little, very little corner of the internet to blab about my previous week’s listening ventures! Lots of bands go on tour, and either you wait for your city to come up or you just have to miss them on tour if you can’t afford to travel. In the year 2025, this should not be the norm with tons of streaming platforms out there, and I feel like all bands should hire a team of folks to ride along on the tour and live stream the concerts. One band that is changing the game on this concept is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Over the past few years, King Gizzard has been live streaming all their shows for free on their YouTube streaming channel. It’s helped grow the community surrounding the band, and I believe it has also given access to the shows for folks that cannot attend, which has made this band explode in popularity.
This weekend was Field of Vision in Buena Vista, Colorado, which is King Gizzard’s weekend-long festival with so much going on. Everything from art projects to drag school… something for everyone. The reason I mention streaming is that the band was nice enough to stream the entire festival for free. Fans could tune in to see so many great bands from all over the world. A couple that stood out to me were Memo PST, Babe Rainbow, Gaye Su Akyol and Jay Weinberg and Argus.
During the day I made it a point to watch Jello Biafra’s spoken word and DJ sets, which of course did not disappoint. His engaging storytelling was hard to listen to when you were distracted by him wearing a gigantic foam pope hat and, you know, just Jello being Jello. His DJ set on drag night was really fun to watch. He was dressed up like an older lady going to tea in the afternoon, wearing a long blonde hair wig, a huge bouffant hat, and a flower dress he got from goodwill that has probably been there since the 80s. Luckily for me, someone took a picture of his set list, so someone else made a playlist of it on Apple Music. It includes all the great hits from all his side projects like Mojo Nixon and Guantanamo School of Medicine along with some songs from Alternative Tentacles label-mate, Wesley Willis. One highlight of Jello Biafra being there was being able to see him perform “Police Truck” with King Gizzard on night one. It sounded great and had a little King Gizz twist on it, which is what everyone was hoping for!
One of the main reasons I love watching King Gizzard live shows is that they have a catalog of 32 albums. When you have that many, you have a wide variety of songs you can play and not repeat songs for a long time. They played for 3 hours each night, going from their heavy stuff and microtonal psych albums to their electronic album and ending with more jammy type psych rock. Honestly, these were some of their best set lists that I have heard since I started following the band back in 2018. I know I have written about King Gizzard many times in my portion of the newsletter, but I feel like it’s well deserved. The band is huge, and they are only getting better at writing songs and presenting them even better at live shows.
Until next week! Be sure to check out everyone else’s pick and go buy some records! Also, We got some really kick-ass new shirts in, so go buy one of those too!