I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust

Just under a month after delivering their award-winning 2016 album Nonagon Infinity, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard took the stage at San Francisco’s The Independent for a set both wildly frenetic and meticulously executed. In one of their final club gigs before bursting onto the international scene—soon selling out amphitheaters and headlining festivals—the Melbourne septet laid down a breakneck performance that, in the words of SF Weekly, “made every organ ache just right.” Newly unearthed by ATO Records, Live in San Francisco ’16 captures an extraordinary moment in the band’s increasingly storied history, a 13-song spectacular likely to leave every listener awestruck and adrenalized.

When Duster were recording their space rock mini-epics on wobbly four-track in a makeshift San Jose home studio in the late '90s, it's likely they weren't imagining that their records would someday be fetching exorbitant prices and that a classy reissue label would someday issue a box set. No doubt they were just having fun making music, expressing themselves, and exploring sound for its own sake, but history has a way of taking strange turns, and in 2019 the Numero Group's Capsule Losing Contact was released. The lavishly packaged set gathers the two albums (1998's Stratosphere and 2000's Contemporary Movement) and one EP (1999's 1975) they released for Up Records and adds the Transmission, Flux EP, the Apex, Trance-Like single, and a handful of rare and previously unreleased tracks. The collection finally restores the music of Duster to people who can now afford to own it and every fan of slowcore, lo-fi space rock and unassumingly brilliant indie rock should plunk down their money and get this set.

Rock is teeming with Great Lost Albums. Mostly they gather dust in a vault somewhere, the odd song resurfacing on future projects. Smither's buried gem was recorded in 1973 in New York with impressive guests including Dr John and Little Feat's Lowell George. The non-appearance of his third album for Poppy - after the label went under and its backers kept the tapes - led to a downward spiral that put paid to most of the 1970s. Unearthed by Heavenly Records 32 years on, it sounds remarkably fresh. There's a definite early 70s feel to the production on band songs such as Sunshine Lady - part Tim Hardin but a bigger part Poppy, since the same sheen was added to Smither's labelmate Townes Van Zandt. But the spare, exquisitely played, bittersweet solo voice-and-guitar songs - Smither's own plus excellent covers of Randy Newman (Guilty) and Bessie Smith (Jailhouse Blues) - are timeless.