Eubanks
Casiopea is what got me on my now never-ending Japanese fusion jazz kick. I was looking into the music of Outrun and got referred to this band and never looked back. Love the crap out of these guys.
In fact, these days all I ever listen to is Japanese fusion and my favorite band ever which I am always thrilled to blab about to anyone who will listen. They may not be so obscure on the internet, but everyone I ever bring them up to thinks I’m making them up.
Anyway, they’re a psych rock outfit from Australia called King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They are super experimental and started out as pretty standard garage rock, but most of their albums are completely different from each other musically, exploring different genres and musical styles. In the ten years they’ve been around they’ve put out 16 albums (including 5 full, stand alone albums in 2017).
They play everything from acoustic dream pop:
to straight up thrash metal:
and all that is in between. They’ve experimented with polyrhythmic prog rock and boogie funk and eastern microtonal music. My favorite album of theirs has to be Fishing for Fishies.
They also have recurring themes and ideas and that weave in and out of their albums in the form of musical motifs or references in the lyrics. The lyrics are often philosophical and metaphorical, but a lot of the stuff they write is drenched in sci fi and fantasy. One of their most prominent themes is a human-robot hybrid who threw up so hard he became then destroyed the universe. This character pops up in more than a handful of their albums in different forms and version and it’s so much fun to find it when it pops up, along with all the other references and characters. Oh and one of their albums has a whole section called The Tale of the Altered Beast which may or may not be a reference to the game.
They also put on a killer live show. Oh and they had 2 drummers for most of their tenure which was a treat to see live. These guys love what they do and show no signs of stopping.