Vocal Analysis of “Loyalty” by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (In Studio and Live)

Vocal Analysis of “Loyalty” by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (In Studio and Live)

 

    Over their decade run so far, King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard, or King Gizz as they’re known to most fans, have become notorious for many reasons. To some, it’s the incredible pace they put out records, with 5 alone in 2017 and their 20th album, Omnium Gatherum, having just come out in April of 2022. To others, it’s their incredible live show and the rigor with which they tour, having played over 600 shows across their career. To die-hard fans, it’s the worlds they create with their music and the supposed inner story within their music, dubbed by fans as “The Gizzverse”. There is no doubt the band has carved out a niche for themselves in the modern psychedelic rock world - but their music isn’t solely made up of one genre. Jumping from fuzzed out garage rock to smooth jazz fusion to throwback thrash metal to electronic pop, there is a sound for everyone. 

    On their fourth 2017 release Polygondwanaland, the band explores a sound inspired in part by the progressive rock of the 1970s, with interlocking polyrhythmic grooves, layers of ethereal synths, and heaps of lyrics that tell several stories of faraway lands and fantasy tales. To aid in illustrating the world the band creates and the characters within it, several vocal effects and techniques are used, both in the studio and when played live. To see how they achieve this and how it compares and contrasts in both settings, there is no better song to look at than “Loyalty”, placed smack dab in the middle of the album and part of one continuous trio of songs - with “Inner Cell’ preceding it and “Horology” following it. Often played together live as well, the trilogy tells the story of a revolution led against an imperial cult leader, and switches often from third person to first person, although “Loyalty” is purely sung in first person from the perspective of the leader himself. 

    After a lengthy introduction, layered vocals by Stu Mackenzie and Joey Walker enter. Using a very close mic placement and a soft, breathy tone, the two singers create an ethereal atmosphere, with Stu providing a lower pedal point harmony to Joey’s higher melodic line. Each stanza is then punctuated with a shift in register - Stu’s harmony rises, while Joey sings in falsetto. After this, the lower register becomes emphasized, with both voices - hard to tell if it’s two takes of Stu’s vocals or both Stu and Joey - slipping into the lower harmony on the line “Those who try, I will drink their blood”. In the live setting, however, there are some differences. The overall arrangement and sound is drier and more cutting without the layers of overdubbed synth and guitar, and the vocals match this with a change in timbre. Instead of the vocal layers, Joey sings the verses alone, keeping the breathy delivery but with a much more forward vowel placement. The falsetto that punctuates each stanza is delivered with more strain, and the low vocals of the final line is replaced with a faux-yodel delivery, with Joey sliding up from chest to head register in a similar way on the words “their blood”. 

    In what could be best described as the chorus, although not by traditional pop structure standards, the vocal duality is kept, but with a twist. While Joey’s higher harmony was mixed more prominently throughout the verses, Stu’s lower harmony is mixed more prominently here, giving the section a darker tone. Much like the verse, the stanzas are punctuated by a line sung in a higher register, which provides structure as here, the rhyme scheme is even more obscured or non-existent, depending on how loosely you define the rhymes. In the live setting, the contrast is similar to the contrast between versions seen in the verse - while Stu joins in for the chorus live, it is mixed in a way that he is almost unnoticeable as a distinct voice, partially due to how well their two voices blend. 

    In the studio recording, the transition to the next section is seamless, occurring immediately after the chorus. The vocals switch to solely Stu for this portion, as he sings the section in double tracked falsetto. Live, however, a much bigger emphasis is put on this section. Guitar feedback and sinister synthesizers pad out a longer instrumental break, giving Stu time to set up the vocoder. In probably the most radical departure from the studio vocal delivery, Stu sings the section through the vocoder, giving it a far more distorted and evil sound. Human augmentation, whether it be organic like in the “Altered Beast” suite from another of their 2017 albums Murder of the Universe, or artificial like in the 2019 track “Cyboogie” (which uses vocoder prominently), is a recurring theme in King Gizz’s discography. While it is not explicit in the lyrics, the switch to vocoder may signal a change in character - not a literal one, but a shift in the way the narrator sees himself from a leader to an outright god. 

    After this, the song launches into a bridge that is comparatively quite dense lyrically. Dissecting the vocal layers, an emphasis is put on higher register vocals, with Stu singing in a more forward, almost nasal tone and Joey providing a higher harmony. With the music in 11/8 time, the vocals are sung in 5/8, giving a polymetric feel that resolves very rarely, with an occasional metric turnaround to resync the vocals and instrumental. The lyrics are split into groups of four syllables, with a gap on the fifth beat of every measure. Joey sings the last syllable of each measure, the fourth beat, in falsetto, giving the line more form. On the line “I will draw and quarter” halfway through the bridge, the vocal balance changes. In almost the reverse fashion of the verse to chorus, where an initial emphasis on the high register led to a lower chorus, the balance here flips, with Joey’s higher harmony being mixed higher at the halfway point. In the live setting, the more nasal affect Stu’s vocals had in the studio version is the tone emphasized. Hot off the heels of the vocoder, this section keeps the sinister energy going with joint vocals from Stu and Joey in a nasal, almost biting tone. In lieu of the layering of the studio version, the live vocals plow forward, giving the section a new energy building off of the section before it.

    To finish the song, in the studio the outro is delivered in a very similar forward, nasal tone as the bridge, with the two voices blending in an almost indistinguishable way. On the last line of the song, “No man, no problem”, Stu slides up into a clear falsetto with Joey staying in chest voice, albeit in a higher register. This use of a registral change as punctuation to a stanza or section is similar to the verse and chorus, and provides a roundedness to the form of the song - hey, it’s that thing they did at the beginning! Live, Joey sings the outro with a similar timbre as the faux-yodel of the verse, sliding up through registers on the final syllable of “loyalty” in each repeated line. This gives the vocals a bit of a yelping sound, and makes the repeated line “where’s the loyalty?” of the outro feel more frantic. Finally, Joey delivers the final line with falsetto, much like the final line of the studio version and many sections in both the studio and live versions. 

    Overall, the way the vocal delivery and manipulation interacts with the lyrics is unique and quite different to most pop music - not many songs on the radio would give reference to a Judas Cradle or tell the story of a despotic ruler in a faraway land being overthrown, yet the band still holds enough of a fanbase to play events like Coachella and Primavera Sound. This is partly due to the fact that King Gizz lies somewhere in between pop and art music; it is popular in comparison to an Emile Mayer lieder, but not to the level of a Top 40 pop song. Much of “Loyalty” is in first person, but not in the sense that Stu or Joey has experienced these events and is portraying them through song, rather in the sense that they are taking the role of a character through which a story is told. Like many songs in the same genre and style, the vocals and lyrics aren’t even the central focus, as they’re often regarded as just another instrument or sound within the greater texture, seen on equal footing as a beat, a riff, or a hook rather than the music existing to serve the vocals. 

    That said, as shown throughout there is still a great deal of analysis that can be done on the vocals and how they’re presented throughout the song, just as you could analyze the changing drum pattern throughout or the way the guitar riffs unfold and are idiomatic to the instrument. The band are outright studio wizards (no pun intended), and this shows in the careful treatment of how the vocals unfold as the studio version of the song goes on. Variety in delivery and use of falsetto as a way to define form along with fine tuning vocal balance to let either low or high harmonies shine depending on the moment, and let each section shine as the story of the lyrics elaborates. Without the level of intricacy portrayed vocally on the studio version possible in the live setting, the band toys with more outward, forward vocal delivery, incorporating similar falsetto to the studio version along with more nasal passages and occasional faux-yodel yelps to add a sense of sinister urgency to the vocals. No overview of the performance is complete without mention of the vocoder, however, bringing a new layer of artificial darkness not present on the studio version. 

    While this is just the analysis of one instrument on one song and a tenth of the music available on one of their twenty albums, the music of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard holds enough depth that this level of scrutiny and analysis could be applied to any aspect of any of their songs. At the same time, none of this work is required for the listener to enjoy the music - you could just as easily throw on this song and groove along, not knowing how the fine balance of vocal tracks keeps the song from getting stale. And with an output that covers countless genres with any level of intensity possible in the music, there truly is something for everyone in their music.