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Everything about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is ruled by a perpetual forward movement, from the relentless momentum of their music to their frequent reinventions to their tendency to release new albums with the regularity of a Substack newsletter. But while there’s a lot of joy to be had in hitching up to the Melbourne psych-rockers’ fairing locomotive, the group’s recent track record suggests they could benefit from erecting guardrails, with the honky-glam hoedown of Fish fishing and the apocalyptic thrash of Infest the nest of rats veering too sharply into the stupid and the brooding, respectively.
Of course, the good thing about such a prolific band is that any missteps are quickly left in the dust and a course correction is almost inevitable, and in King Gizzard’s case, even a global pandemic won’t. cannot slow down their rolling. In addition to dropping several live releases, two concert films and a host of Bandcamp memorabilia in recent months, King Gizzard recorded two albums of new material while on lockdown, each member of the now sextet. posing its parts in isolation. in their respective home studios. The results were delivered in two times: KG, released last November, and its freshly minted counterpart, LW They are discreet records, but fit together to form a continuous double album, wrapped in a trilogy: KG and LW are shown as the remaining parts of a triptych that began with 2017 Flying microtonal banana, where the band fully embraced the disruptive balance effects of the quarter-tone chord.
But if the works can be technically connected, the KG / LW combo deserves its own unique place in the group’s labyrinthine catalog. Coming in the wake of King Gizzard’s 10th anniversary, the albums serve the same function as the sprawling Goblin of Freedom made for their equally industrious psych-punk peer Ty Segall: They cap off a decade of furious activity by reconciling all of the band’s distant influences into a full 360-degree portrait of the band. The savage stylistic variation of King Gizzard’s canon made them the kind of group where 10 different fans could name 10 different albums as their favorite; KG / LW strives to be one that everyone can agree on.
Accompanied by two radical versions of their new de facto theme song “KGLW” – which sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack given the prog-folk and doom-metal makeovers –KG / LW has a circular structure reminiscent of the group’s 2016 infinite loop opus Nonagon Infinity. But the sense of the cohesion of the albums is more than a simple product of a wise sequencing. Over the course of these records, King Gizzard synthesizes his entire musical palette – British psych-pop and proto-metal, German Kosmische rock, West African rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, sitar-speckled psychedelia, American roots music. – in compact songs which leave an equal place for the creation of songs and the improvisation impulses of the group to flourish.
KG, in particular, has a natural fluidity that belies its fragmentary construction, and a constant rhythmic thrust that reflects the urgency of its Scorched Earth lyrics. As the album unfolds, each song emerges as a new scene on an endless dystopian Disney boat ride through the gravest threats to our civilization: Uncontrolled AI (“Automation”), Right-Wing Trolls radicalized (“Minimum Brain Size”), the unsustainability of modern capitalism (“Straws in the wind”), xenophobia fueled by a pandemic (“Some of us”).
On this first part, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard reaffirm their status as a house group for the post-Trump geopolitical tumult, but instead of conceptual suites on barfing robots and intergalactic colonization, KG feels much more grounded, even personal. The album’s vigorous peak-hour stars, “Ontology” and “Oddlife,” each reflect on the meaning of life from opposing macro and micro angles. Where the former translates his great unknowable requests (“Why is there someone? / Why are we thinking? / What is it for? / Why anything?”) Into an existential crisis on which you can dance, the second is an unglamorous look at the physically and mentally exhausting touring experience: “No concept of geography,” sings conductor Stu Mackenzie, “I wake up and I’m still tired / I drink until I am completely asleep.
But if “Oddlife” seems at odds with the rest of the news on the album (not to mention somewhat untimely for a time when many bands would kill only to feel exhausted coming back on tour), it ultimately speaks of a universal enigma: the fact that we are often too exhausted from our professional lives to fight bigger battles. And as “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” ends KG in a fuzz-metal storm we are reminded that failure to break our complacency and heed the warnings of history will have dire consequences for all of us. “We’re foolish pissers” who “haven’t learned the meaning,” Mackenzie boils, suggesting that not only is our demise almost assured, but well deserved.
So, after putting the fate of humanity in the trash, what remains to be done? Well if the opening of LW This is one indication, there is still time for King Gezier and the Lizard Magician to pass the “world’s weirdest act of homage to Steely Dan” off their bucket list. LW“If not now, then when?” snaps into a crisp, clavinet-spun Aja groove while Mackenzie shows Kevin Parker isn’t the only Australian psych-rocker covering up a killer falsetto. The ruinous imagery remains – rising oceans, raging wildfires, endangered species – but the surprisingly elegant execution betrays their skill at repackaging the same messages.
As this sudden change of direction indicates, LW is more of a purse, and a sense of diminishing returns sets in as tracks like “ONE” revolve around the same musical and ideological territory. Indeed, LW looks like KG After three more months of lockdown: he’s more anxious, angrier, and less anxious about letting his guts hang around, allowing “Static Electricity’s” acid-folk motorik to gallop toward the six-minute mark in a blaze of microtonal shredding. But if the pieces are looser, the targets are more precise. Keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s “Supreme Ascendancy” is a scathing attack on Catholic Church history of sexual abuse cover-up; ‘East West Link’, meanwhile, protests against the eponymous highway plan that has become a political lightning rod in Melbourne, making for the most exciting song about a town planning proposal you’re likely to hear anywhere. ‘year.
But as much of their social conscience and observations of the world have become central to their identity, King Gezier and the Lizard Wizard still have the feeling of a secret society – and the latest eight-minute version of “KGLW” is its national anthem. , a mud – metal mantra that repeats the group’s initials as if casting an ancient spell to awaken a long-asleep mythical beast. The enraged fanbase of King Gezier and the Lizard Sorcerer has been called cult on numerous occasions; consider this song – and KG / LW as a whole – the official indoctrination ceremony.
Buy: Rough Trade
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