[Riff] Eulogy for Vizier
There’s a lot of cool music out there that’s been made and thrown onto Bandcamp to lie dormant until Epic kills the platform. There are bottomless depths of musical madness to be plumbed, endless FLAC files to be filched, many nerdy lists to be made. There are bands that sparked bright but died young, and from the beginning I’ve want to eulogise some of them here on ISC.
I’m particularly interested in the stuff that’s come from my city. I’ve been going to gigs in Melbourne for 10 years now, and there are a handful of projects I’ve stumbled across that have gotten lodged in my brain like an apple in some kind of musically-minded cockroach*, and then disappearted completely. There are also a handful of acts that I was just too late for, who had their day in the sun before crawling back under their rock. Or, maybe they didn’t have their day in the sun, maybe a shitty writeup from me is the best that they’re destined to ever get – in which case, uhhh, sucks, guys. If the walls of The Old Bar could talk, they’d tell us about that fucking awesome jam band band that played a show there once in 2015 but that even they can’t remember the name of.
Vizier were a post-prog trio who were active between 2016 and 2019. I first found them at that most auspicious of events, the monthly open mic at Pony Music, where they very much stood out amongst aging shoegazers, aging singer-songwriters**, aged-care karaoke couple, and Pantera guy. They would soon eclipse this wild bunch, sharing the stage with the likes of Myriad Drone, Beautiful Bedlam, and All is Violent (who they would briefly share a guitarist with) before calling it quits just before 2020 – a move that feels weirdly sensible, in retrospect. If they’d stuck around, who knows where they would have gone from there?
We got five tracks from Vizier, split between a demo EP and a live video. I’ve compiled them here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVU-HLM--6M
https://vizieraus.bandcamp.com/track/tomb-mouth-live-sooki-lounge-belgrave-2018
https://vizieraus.bandcamp.com/album/demo-2017
We’ve got a bit of a post-rock scene in Melbourne these days, with bands like Bear the Mammoth, Treebeard, Myriad Drone, All is Violent, Skin Thief, SANDS, and Sliknita (my band!) being quite active. Back in 2015, there was a lot less of this; I won’t say that there wasn’t a scene, because there may have been and I was just too young to notice, but as a person who was looking to enter at the time, it sure did look like a load of nothing. In that environment, Vizier were like an oasis in the desert, and even now I’ve honestly got a huge soft spot for them compared to the current bands, who I’ll only really appreciate once they’re gone (related note: RIP Fourteen Nights at Sea).
Their live show was something to behold – hypnotic, energetic, groovy. Tight, but loose in all the right places. Psychadelic and heavy, timefucky, progressive and lots of other appropriate adjectives. I’ve always thought of Vizier as a post-rock band due to the crescendo-y ambience of it all, but they groove more in the vein of Cog or Karnivool, the former in particular; it wouldn’t have been *too* surprising if Flynn Gower’s siren-like yarling inexplicably materialised onto tracks like ‘Space Eater’ or ‘Eternal,’ ranting about government control. Even now, listening to Vizier is a treat, especially in terms of its looesness; I’m 90% sure these guys were jamming on stage half the time, and it lent a meditative quality to their playing. Each performance was its own beast – I’m sure you could say this for most bands, but with Vizier it was like this was something that they took on board, and they weren’t aiming that much for consistency. Also, as a person who often needs time to digest music, it’s interesting to me how much of this music has stuck around in my brain after all this time. It’s special.
Go on, do a discog run. It won’t take you long, and if you’re anything like me you’ll be hearing some of these riffs in your dreams years later.
RIP Vizier. For fans of post-rock and Karnivool/Tool-style prog.