![]() ![]() Their attempts at, for example, thrash metal have always felt a little toothless. Previously explored on 2015’s Paper Mâché Dream Balloon and 2019’s Fishing For Fishies, this whimsical, sunny tone feels like the place where King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are most comfortable. Defined by both its affable disposition and compositional focus, its influence on the three albums released by King Gizzard in the past month month ( Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, Laminated Denim and Changes) is palpable. Of this recent bunch, 2020’s Butterfly 3000 is the clear highlight. Within their sprawling runtimes, these opuses flicker too manically between innumerable styles, careening through disparate tangents with all the elegance of a car crash. ![]() and the colossal Omnium Gatherumhave lacked the internal focus of earlier experiments. Recent excursions, such as the major-label debuts K.G. The band’s personality was always strong enough to create a throughline that navigated the boldest left-turns. What made them so compelling, however, is that each diversion always felt like a natural shift. Prior to 2020, with pretty much every album King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard hopped onto a different musical tangent, ranging from garage rock to folk to thrash metal. Along with other novel release strategies, highlighted by the egalitarian idea of encouraging fans and labels to make and sell their own copies of 2017’s Polygondwanaland, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have developed a reputation for relentless production that threatens to overshadow their actual craft.Ĭritical reaction to some of the band’s recent work would suggest that the quality of their work has waned somewhat in recent years. In 2017 alone they released five full-length studio albums. Since 2012, the Melbourne, Australia-based seven-piece have released a staggering 23 studio albums, 14 live albums and numerous EPs and compilations. It slowly weaves its way through the many facets of the band’s back catalogue in a way that leads to moments of “I’ve been listening to this song for 5 minutes and now it sounds nothing like what it did” without much fanfare.King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard’s hyper-productive output has become the stuff of legend. This new effort doesn’t have anything that specific to separate it, although what it lacks in conceptual insanity, it makes up for tenfold in the frenetic sense of never quite settling on one sound that permeates throughout. ![]() This is fundamentally a huge part of why King Gizzard get so much critical appraisal every album has its quirks, like last release ‘Laminated Denim’ being 2 extended jam sessions cut to exactly 15 minutes each, or 2017’s ‘Flying Microtonal Banana’ being formed primarily with frontman Stu Mackenzie’s crazy custom guitar, in all its bright yellow, microtonal-fretted glory. Surely it starts to fade in to one big stream of consciousness now, especially with the freeform, psychedelic nature of the content? So, where to start? 23 albums under their belt, despite having been around a year less than, say, Jinjer (4 studio albums). Cue inevitable plaudits and appraisal from your not-so-humble reviewer, in a thinly veiled show of adoration… Yes, in the realm of things that shouldn’t surprise you one bit, there’s another new release from Australia’s finest purveyors of strangeness and charm their third this month. A new album by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard? Ah, it must be Friday… ![]()
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