By William Alexander
Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard launched their subsequent LP The Silver Cord (and its prolonged version) on October 27th. This is the band’s 25th full size studio album, regardless of them solely having shaped in 2010. With such an unlimited and genre-spanning discography, it may be tough for potential followers of ‘Gizz’ to know the place to start out with their music.
Here are 5 of their best albums:
Paper Mâché Dream Balloon (2015)
King Gizzard’s acoustic album appears like childhood. Setting apart their screeching electrical guitars and dusting off their bongos and flutes, the band crafts an album as warming as scorching chocolate on an icy day. With a runtime of simply over half-hour divided between 12 tracks (together with an instrumental epilogue) this album’s songs are quaint each in dimension and elegance – a stark change from King Gizzard’s typical behemoth, digital opuses.
The band muses over on a regular basis points, vocals little greater than a whisper. The melodies are mild, candy and catchy, and the manufacturing is immersive and lovely. This album is probably as accessible to the overall listener as Gizzard will get – and it’s considered one of their greatest.
Omnium Gatherum (2022)
Omnium Gatherum opens with percussion-driven monitor ‘The Dripping Tap’, which clocks in at a mighty 18 minutes. The music displays the band’s distinctive potential to extract numerous drum grooves and guitar hooks from a central musical theme in a approach that by no means turns into boring. The monitor accelerates and soars and doesn’t stop to shock.
The remainder of the album is a conglomeration (an ‘omnium gatherum’, if you’ll) of genres starting from steel to R&B and hip-hop. Despite the dearth of overarching idea, the album feels thematically constant by way of its manufacturing and heavy instrumentation, in addition to its fantastical lyrical topics (see ‘Sadie Sorceress’, ‘The Garden Goblin’ and ‘The Grim Reaper’). Not each music is a masterpiece, however the sheer vary of high quality tracks on the file is beautiful.
A specific spotlight is the 7-minute-long ‘Evilest Man’, a musical oxymoron which alternates between peaceable, synth-filled verses and choruses alive with layers of shrieking guitars and a thumping bassline. The music crescendos to a riveting climax and is endlessly replayable.
Fishing for Fishies (2019)
On Fishing for Fishies, King Gizzard dive deep into blues-y music. Although coping with a style that may be overly prescriptive and painfully by-product, Gizz brings a freshness. The hovering guitar runs of ‘The Cruel Millennial’, the booming bassline of ‘Real’s Not Real’, the howling harmonica of ‘Boogieman Sam’ and the vocoder of ‘Cyboogie’ are all instrumental nuances which depart the songs feeling unique.
The biggest tonal shift of the file arrives within the penultimate monitor ‘Acarine’, when its Middle-Eastern hand-drums and strings disappear, and the music morphs briefly into an digital piece that wouldn’t really feel out of place in a vaguely edgy membership, or in a John Wick movie.
The undeniably cute title monitor is probably probably the most didactic (pleading tenderly in opposition to Fishing for Fishies) and is without doubt one of the key contributors to the album’s environmental theme. Generally, although, King Gizzard excels extra instrumentally than lyrically, and the identical is true of this album.
Murder of the Universe (2017)
Metal meets spoken-word on this tripart album. Murder of the Universe tells three distinct sci-fi tales by three musical suites, the tracks of which act extra as chapters than songs. The first of those, ‘The Tale of the Altered Beast’, describes a person who succumbs to the temptation of turning into a monster-human hybrid. The second, ‘The Lord of Lightning vs. Balrog’, describes a battle between the 2 beings. ‘Han-Tyumi & The Murder of the Universe’ tells the story of a depressed cyborg who needs to recapture his humanity by attaining two skills a cyborg can by no means have – to have the ability to vomit and to have the ability to die.
‘The Lord of Lightning’ is definitely the weakest of the three suites, however the two tales which sandwich it are genuinely partaking; amusing and disturbing in equal measure, and surprisingly tough to placed on pause. An album whose construction is fully antithetical to our pop sensibilities can be sudden to bear earworms, but the odd melodic motifs of ‘The Altered Beast’ proceed to crawl into the thoughts days after the file has ended. Murder of the Universe as a complete exhibits King Gizzard’s potential to craft prolonged and interconnected narratives; while the band’s lyrical ideas can usually really feel nonsensical or underdeveloped, this album appears like one cohesive unit.
Flying Microtonal Banana (2017)
King Gizzard refuses not solely to be certain by any single style, but additionally by the 12 notes of conventional Western music. Flying Microtonal Banana, because the (admittedly odd) title suggests, sees the band discover the subdivisions between conventional musical frequencies – the ‘microtones’ hiding in-between every be aware. King Gizzard fuses microtonal devices with momentum-fuelled psychedelic tunes to create a consistently thrilling monitor listing that tickles the ear drums in a approach that non-microtonal music would battle to.
A dreamy environment surrounds this album. Sharp, pleasantly dissonant guitars converse with one another atop a viscous layer of intricate percussion and ambient noise. Tortured howls of zurnas pierce by the soundscape whereas misty vocals and ambiguous lyrics paint hazy pictures of creatures and landscapes within the thoughts.
In a time when so many pronounce rock as useless, King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard present us the style is alive and properly – and simply as fascinating as ever.
Illustration: Hayleigh McLean
