King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard @ Academy, Manchester, 22 Feb

Late last year Rolling Stone described King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Melbourne headquarters as a “psych-rock music factory”. It’s certainly true that the definition-defying seven-piece turned out work on an industrial level in 2017. After the success of breakout LP Nonagon Infinity twelve months prior, frontman Stu Mackenzie declared in an interview that the band would be putting out no fewer than five full-lengths in the same calendar year. On 31 December, with the release of Gumbucket Soup, he kept his promise, albeit at the eleventh hour; the record followed Flying Microtonal Banana, Murder of the Universe, Sketches of Brunswick East and Polygondwanaland, all of which arrived between February and November 2017.

Incredibly, the group continued to tour last year even as they were firing out fresh material, and if their schedule then was relatively light in order to accommodate their studio work, we can probably expect them to be married to the road in 2018. As promoters Now Wave pointed out in a tweet ahead of tonight’s show, it’s astonishing that a band with such a daft name, who failed to sell out Northern Quarter pub Gulliver’s in 2014, can now pack rooms this size, but it quickly becomes clear why; as they launch into the first of two sets, which is built around Flying Microtonal Banana, you realise that party rock is as fitting a term as any for the kind of music that King Gizzard play. Opener Rattlesnake is an exercise in towering riffery, and even the hazy likes of Billabong Valley feels weirdly energetic as part of such a fizzing live dynamic.

A countdown clock, set at fifteen minutes, appears between sets one and two; it’s during the second that you begin to realise that the group’s focus on furious pace comes at the cost of them eventually sounding a little bit one-dimensional. Evil Death Roll and Welcome to an Altered Future lead things off stylishly, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in hard thereafter; after such a pretty opening slot from Mild High Club, with whom King Gizzard collaborated on Sketches of Brunswick East, you begin to wonder whether less might be more.

It’s an absurd thing to expect out of a band who just put out five albums in the same year, but a more concentrated blast of psychedelic mayhem might have left more of an impression tonight. Instead, we got warts-and-all King Gizzard, scintillating one minute and a touch messy the next. It’ll have delighted the hardcore, but the more casual observer might have felt their engagement level wavering from time to time.