★★★★☆
Genre-bending psych outfit King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard interact an arsenal of synthesisers for his or her twenty fifth studio album, leaving their consolation zone for a galactic robo-rave. Read our The Silver Cord evaluate.
“We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts,” teased Stu Mackenzie, frontman of the six-piece psychedelic-rock band that thrives on throwing surprises about their subsequent path.
The Aussie’s fondness for experimentation has seen them flit between scuzzy garage-rock, clunky doom metallic, flute-laden people, relaxed jazz, and even a sprinkling of synth-pop.
But followers are in for a penny and a pound. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard sink their fingers into all of the music style pies, and it’s solely heightened their cultish fandom.
With The Silver Cord – their latest exhausting flip – they’ve discarded the microtonal guitars and fuzz pedals in favour of modulator synthesisers and digital percussion, with hectic, hilarious (however combined) outcomes throughout its seven-song length. To accuse King Gizz’ of such mediocrity feels just like the antithesis of their ethos, as they will’t assist themselves attempt each musical fashion on the buffet.
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Granted, they’ve a rare means to choose up random musical gizmos, however we are able to’t anticipate them to at all times attain their loftiest peaks, particularly contemplating their ridiculously prolific output – that is their twenty fifth studio album since 2012! Madness.
Jumping into their toy field of synth devices, these preparations (gleefully nodded to on the album’s paintings) act because the bedrock of the document, together with the trusted Juno-60, which was used closely for 2021’s Butterfly 3000, their most synth-y album earlier than this.
However, the opening three tracks, ‘Theia’, ‘The Silver Cord’ and ‘Set’, don’t blast off as one had hoped and really feel like a waste of the tactic they’ve used on earlier albums, the place a number of tracks really feel like one lengthy odyssey.
Each has a wholly totally different tempo and texture – the optimistic dance-pop of ‘Theia’ brushes shoulders with Madonna’s 1998 hit ‘Ray Of Light’; the title monitor floats round in orbit till the pumping crescendo; ‘Set’ absolutely embraces a 90s euro-pop membership banger aesthetic, full with shoulder-shimmying rhythms.
But then all of it unfolds like a bunch of mad scientists holding a drug-addled warehouse rave.
Usually seen caressing a harmonica, sideman Ambrose Kenny-Smith takes the lead for a hefty portion of ‘Set’ and ‘Gilgamesh’, spitting Beastie Boys-type bars over an acid rave backdrop, warped by vocoders and different mind-bending results that soak the vocals.
It’s definitely intergalactic. You can hear the band’s hype man leaning into it all through, and it’s clear they’re all having amusing. The weirder King Gizzard turn out to be, the higher they operate.
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Lyrically, The Silver Cord feels probably the most acquainted. King Gizz’ persistently prioritise playfulness over profundity, and as soon as once more conjure up tales of cyborgs and legendary prophecies that’d make Isaac Asimov proud. But that’s the one consolation zone they dwell in on this album.
You can solely gawp in awe on the band’s insatiable want to discover unknown territories, and The Silver Cord is one other welcome addition to the ‘Gizz-Verse’. Though it’s definitely not a gateway album into their oeuvre by any means, deal with it like an perception into their freewheeling, genre-mashing nature, and also you’ll rapidly be taught to like it. Then, give the 90-minute prolonged model a punt.
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