082619 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard/Stonefield, Montreal, QC

In August of 2019 m’lady and I had the great pleasure of travelling to Harbour Grace, Newfoundland to pick up the keys to our first-ever house, a lovely wooden two-storey that was built on the shores of the harbour way back in 1835.  It marked the culmination of two years of searching the province for just the right spot and the realization of a number of dreams that I pretty much thought would never happen.

And they did.

We spent three nights sleeping on an air mattress in what would one day become the spare bedroom, a bunch of neighbours being oh-so-neighbourly dropped by to introduce themselves, and after much-too-short we locked the door, pointed our car west, and bid farewell to our new home for the next few months.

Why?  Because we had a concert to go to.

I forget what caused us to miss the last King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard concert in Montreal but we did.  We had tickets and everything, but we had to dump them for some reason or another (come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if we missed that concert due to a completely different house in Newfoundland that we almost bought at the time…).  That would have been the follow-up to our first King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard show (which was fantastic and had also been in Montreal) but luckily they had announced a third consecutive annual show; we had tickets, and dammit, we weren’t going to miss it this time.

And so we drove across the island of Newfoundland (the 16th largest island in the world, doncha know) and boarded the overnight ferry to Nova Scotia, where we greeted the day with a coffee and a six-hour drive to Moncton, where we spent the night at my mom’s house and picked up a 10’ trailer that my brother was loaning us for our upcoming move, before driving like maniacs towards Montreal.  I knew traversing the city with the trailer would be problematic and parking with it would be nearly impossible so we opted to drive right by our target and on to Ottawa where I quickly dropped the trailer off at our soon-to-be-former home and turned the car back towards Montreal.

And you know what?  We got all checked in to our hotel and walked to the nearby venue with plenty of time to meet our friends, grab a pair of drinks and settle in for the opening band. Amazing.

The date was August 26th, 2019, and I was about to see one of the best rock concerts of my life.  But first, the opening act.

It was Stonefield, an all-female Australian band and one of the two opening acts from the last time I saw King Gizzard.  Last time I remember thinking they were pretty good, this time I disagreed.  Somehow this quartet of obviously untrained musicians playing half-written songs has won the opening-gig prize of presenting their junk in front of sold-out crowds around the world, and I can only guess that sex is involved somehow.  And I don’t mean “gender”.

Setting that aside, King Gizzard came out and played a show that instantly vaulted them to one of my favourite live bands to see, and an act that I will have a very, very hard time missing next time around (though I might skip the opening act)*.

The band was so, so much more than they used to be, and they used to be phenomenal.  It turns out what I thought was “their sound” was just one of their phases, because since then they’d gone through a boogie-woogie phase (yes, a boogie-woogie phase) and (more recently) a Metallica phase.  And boy, do they do pastiche right.

It was like the Wizard’s were playing a lost Metallica album that would have been heralded as their best, and they were playing it with such accurate ferocity that I was on the edge of my metaphoric seat from the get-go.  My gosh, it was so good.  Sure, they dabbled into their psychedelic rock and their boogie-woogie too, but man, that edgy stuff really filled my balloon.

I couldn’t move and I couldn’t look away.  It was new, it was fresh, and it was amazing.  That the evening was tinted with the sweet relief and bliss of finally realizing my Newfoundland dream is unquestionable, but I think if we had lost the house I still would have loved this show.

But we didn’t lose the house.  And man, did I love this show.

*As it turned out, stupid covid made missing King Gizzard’s May, 2020 Montreal show much, much easier, as it was drastically if not indefinitely postponed.