Live music review: King Gizzard’s Field of Vision nights two and three with no song repeats

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard don’t rest. The Melbourne sextet closed out the second Field of Vision Festival with two more three-hour sets on August 15 and 16, pushing deeper into the Meadow Creek grounds in Buena Vista, Colorado they’d already claimed as their own. They’d fired the first shot on day one: a surprise drop of their 28th LP, Alien Metal, with zero warning. Then came the dare. “No song repeats,” the band promised Friday night, and fans spent the rest of the weekend hunting for new-album cuts and deep tracks to see if that promise would hold. Field of Vision was three of only seven U.S. tour dates. There was no room to coast.

Denver’s own Blood Incantation stepped up as Gizz’s main opener Saturday, a slot that’s buried better bands than them. Opening for a fanbase this rabid is a challenge. Blood Incantation didn’t blink. The extreme metal trailblazers built their recent burst of fame on 2024’s Absolute Elsewhere, the fourth album of their career and the one that dragged them out of the underground and into tests like this one. They played it start to finish: just two tracks, both longform, both crushing. Frontman Paul Riedl cracked that side A of the set was track one and side B was track two. When a song runs twenty minutes, a setlist is beside the point.

King Gizz picked up right where they’d left off, closing out “The River” from the night before, the song the town’s sound curfew had cut short. “Wah Wah,” off Nonagon Infinity, followed hot on its heels, snapping the set from sprawl to hooks in one move. Then came the real surprise: two bustouts from 2011 EP Willoughby’s Beach, “Black Tooth” and “Dead-Beat.” Mackenzie copped to it onstage, admitting it took swallowing some ego to dig that far back into the catalog. This is a band that’s always chasing the next thing, and the fans want everything they’ve ever made. Gizz gave it to them.

A show highlight arrived early: Polygondwanaland bookends “Crumbling Castle” and “The Fourth Colour,” pulled from the 2017 record and still landing as showstoppers eight years on. A lively metal turn brought out “Hell,” off Infest the Rat’s Nest, with drummer Jay Weinberg sitting in. The former Slipknot and Suicidal Tendencies drummer has been trading songs with Gizz since 2024, when he first climbed onstage in Nashville to play “Perihelion.” A week after this set, his father Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen’s drummer for fifty years, would do the same at Forest Hills, working “Hot Water” alongside Gizz’s own Michael Cavanagh. Good genes, or good friends. Either way, it stayed in the family.

Then came Nathan, the band’s modular synth table, wheeled out to strip old guitar cuts down and rebuild them electronic. “The Bitter Boogie” cracked the door open, and a hard-hitting “Perihelion” rendition kept it there. The band’s command of that rig has only gotten sharper since its 2024 U.S. debut, less fumbling with the knobs, more precision.

More Alien Metal cuts followed: the title track and “Kill For The Steel,” both landing warm with a crowd that’s followed Gizz through stranger detours than this. The Silver Cord took some fans longer to come around on. Not this time.

A Murder of the Universe suite pulled from the “Altered Beast” arc kept the pit moving, futuristic psych-punk built for a mosh. It’s a shame Leah Senior, who voices the record’s spoken narration, hasn’t made it out to Field of Vision yet. Next year, maybe.

The band closed with a four-song sprint, headlined by a live debut of “Gliese 710,” off Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, worked as a full jam vehicle. “Trapdoor,” the Paper Mâché Dream Balloon classic, kept the crowd moving before Gizz closed with “Hypertension” and “Head On / Pill.” Curfew caught up with them before “Pill” finished. They promised to close it out at the festival’s final show.

Day three took a page from last year’s playbook: brutal heat. Without rain, there’s no cooldown in the mountains, and at 8,000-plus feet closer to the sun than most fans are used to, shade wasn’t optional after three nights of indulgence. Gizz had to start an hour early to make curfew, so a little rest went a long way before the last push.

Sunday was drag day. Fans came out in the drag of their choice, and the band followed suit right along with them. Before Gizz took the stage, drag icon Pattie Gonia opened with a high-energy, politically charged show backed by a full troupe, activism that felt necessary given where things stand on rights right now.

King Gizz wasted no time, picking up the previous night’s unfinished “Head On / Pill” and stretching it another 35 minutes, the closest thing the band has to a “Bohemian Rhapsody,” cliché as that comparison is. “Sea of Trees,” a 12 Bar Bruise cut from the band’s earliest days, followed right behind it, a deep pull for anyone who’s followed Gizz back to their Castle Face and Flightless Records years.

A microtonal run came next with “Anoxia,” “Doom City,” and “Minimum Brain Size,” guitars tuned to intervals most rock bands never touch, a sound the band’s made feel like second nature to a fanbase that’s grown up on it. When Stu straps on the yellow guitar he calls the Flying Banana, something’s about to happen. A rarity showed up too: “The Book,” off the Mild High Club collaboration Sketches of Brunswick East, a song that barely leaves the vault.

Nathan came back out for a handful of cuts, including a rebuilt “Slow Jam 1” off I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, a live fan favorite in any form despite the chillaxed name. Then a live oddity: “Murder of the Universe,” mostly spoken narrative, the closing chapter of a cyborg clawing its way toward human emotion. Nathan only sharpens the trip.

Two more Alien Metal debuts, “Sapience” and “Superheavy, Supercritical,” kept the sold-out crowd dancing. The festival felt more packed this year, and Meadow Creek held up under it, minus the heavy police presence.

By the time Nathan wrapped, the clock was working against them. Buena Vista doesn’t bend on its sound ordinance, first week of school for half the county after all. Gizz answered with a metal gut-punch: a heavier-than-hell “Gilgamesh,” off The Silver Cord, all red-lined guitars and steady drums, one of the weekend’s peaks. “The Great Chain of Being,” off Gumboot Soup, kept the drop-tuned rage going for one more round.

The set softened before the finish: “Ambergris” and “Work This Time,” carried by guitarist Joey Walker’s Funkadelic-coded soloing, locked into Mackenzie like it’s nothing. Gizz broke their own no-repeat rule to close the second Field of Vision the only way they could: “Field of Vision,” off Flight b741. Ambrose made Mackenzie sing the “Silly Billy” tag, the cathartic ending the band always tacks on, as a parting shot. At 10 p.m., the lights went down and the band promised Colorado a third round next year. 

Three nights, three hours each, zero repeats, and the only rest anyone got was in the shade between sets. That’s the whole review in miniature: King Gizzard don’t rest, and for one weekend in the Rockies, neither did anyone lucky enough to be there.

King Gizzard take the rest of the year off before five shows in Australia this fall. Tickets are on the band’s site.

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