In a rush and can’t read the full recap? Make sure to check out: "Slow Jam 1," "Billabong Valley," "Le Risqué," "The Garden Goblin," and "Hypertension."

photo by Jakov Šafran

King Gizzard’s European tour rolled into Vienna with a heavy and eclectic show on 2024-05-19. While not as improvisational as the previous nights, their stop at the Arena Wien kept the band’s incredible run of shows going with some unique surprises (both planned and unplanned).

About half of this set saw the band on their C#-tuned guitars, meaning that the band kept it focused on the darker, moodier side of their discography. They open with a performance of “Venusian 2” that goes over well with the audience. While the song is often played like it is on Infest the Rats’ Nest, on this version they instead dive straight into a heavy metal jam at the end, with the band chanting behind the pounding drums and chugging guitars. This goes right into a great performance of “Hell” which is played straight with no additions. From here they move away from Infest and into PetroDragonic Apocalypse with a devastating “Supercell” that gets Stu moving. Notably, this is the first repeat of the European tour and the band would sprinkle a few others into this set alongside it. Keeping in line with the album’s track listing, the band performs a stellar “Converge” which sends the audience into a fury. From there we get “Witchcraft” which, at this point, seems to be a very reliable track for the band (this is the sixth time this year they’ve brought it out). Of course, they nail it.

photo by ToraTapes

With a bit under thirty minutes of metal out of the way, we head back ten years for the chill I’m In Your Mind Fuzz song “Slow Jam 1.” The band (fittingly) takes their time on this one with a long jam between the first two verses which ends up using riffs from “Ice V.” By the end the band teases a number of songs, such as the extended version of “Chang’e” (which they last jammed on 2024-05-16) as well as the new song “Sad Pilot”. Towards the end of the jam, Cook takes his reverse Flying V off and moves to the keyboards. Here, the band hints at “Loyalty” but they never transition into it, instead ending abruptly. It signals the next pick for the set: a well played performance of Polygondwanaland’s “Inner Cell” > “Loyalty” > “Horology”. Barring a lyrical flub by Joey during “Horology,” the band is pretty tight here, leaving the C# section of the show with a good ending.

photo by Jakov Šafran

The next section of the show focused on the band’s microtonal output and started with a quick performance of “O.N.E.” before giving the audience a unique “Billabong Valley”. From the start we know that this one will be unusual. While Ambrose usually plays Stu’s Flying Microtonal Banana during the song (or at least holds it), here he opts to go without it to command the audience. He certainly does this. walking off the stage into the photo pit before crowd surfing into the audience. As he does this, Stu grabs his microtonal guitar and starts jamming with the band, even sprinkling in a tease of “Doom City”. Joey and Stu also get the crowd to operatically sing the melody of the song as Ambrose screams and serenades in the audience. The band end the microtonal section after only two songs but the high energy of “Billabong Valley” feels like a whole journey in and of itself.

photo by Jakov Šafran

Another surprise is up the band’s sleeve as they move back to the C#-tuned guitars: a very unusual move for this band. Even more surprising, they gave the audience a new song called “Le Risqué.” It’s a blues rock song that features a very unique first: lead vocals from drummer Michael Cavanaugh! He has sung background vocals before like on Infest the Rats’ Nest, but this was his vocal debut. After Joey sings about love, Cavs comes in and lists a number of things he (or the character in the song) lacks. As the title implies, some of this is risqué. After a long pause, they kick back in before handing it to Stu, who leads the band to the end with an explosive energy. In the last four shows, the band has debuted four songs. This is just the newest example. This amount of debuts at the start of a tour is basically unheard of.

photo by Jakov Šafran

We get to hear Cook for the first time this tour with a song called “Borat.” He’s just joking. Instead we get a punchy rendition of “The Garden Goblin” that goes as perfectly as it could. Now at the end of the set, the band lays heavy into the jam-centric side of their output with a fairly conventional “Iron Lung” with goes into a long, climatic “Hypertension” that teases “Robot Stop”, “Evil Death Roll” and “Le Risqué.” The band ends the night on an uncharacteristically gleeful “Evil Death Roll” that rattles through teases from PetroDragonic Apocalypse and Polygondwanaland.