King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

★★★ Omnium Gatherum KGLW. CD/DL

Australian prog-psych rockers’ panoramicsounding ‘lockdown’ album. Melbourne’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are nothing if not hard-working, notching up 20 studio albums in half as many years. Omnium

Gatherum’s 15 tracks encompass trippy prog-folk and furball-in-the-throat heavy metal and all points in between. In doing so, it doubles as a primer for KGLW’s past work; albums that zigzag from New-Age trance one year to detuned guitars the next. This latest work’s centrepiece, though, is the 18-minute The Dripping Tap, with its echoes of ’70s Hawkwind and Gong’s Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy. Here, the chorus becomes a meditative chant over chuntering guitars and metronomic drums. The rest can’t quite compete, and is at its best on the contrasting Magenta Mountain and Presumptuous, with its whispery Traffic soundalike flute. If the thrashing Gaia and Predator X feel like unwelcome intrusions, there’s always something gentler three or four minutes away. Unpredictably good fun.

Mark Blake