Seven days of thunder
How Australia’s psych-rock adventurers jammed for a week and struck gold. By
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard ★★★★ Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava KGLW. CD/DL/LP
IT’S REASSURING to know that 2022 is just like 2017 in one regard: another year where King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will release five studio LPs, three of them dropping this month.
This latest triplicate brings the LP tally from
Stu Mackenzie’s crew to
23 in 10 years, an astonishing productivity which has seen off faltering peers like Osees and Ty Segall, and possibly even outstrips ’90s Guided By Voices.
But herein lies a problem with KG&TLW: you can end up discussing the surfeit more than the substance. More significantly, of late there has been a major shift in their methodology.
Driven lynchpin Mackenzie had settled into a pattern of collating material into genre collections – thrash-metal on Infest The Rats’
Nest (2019), three volumes of ‘microtonal’ Turkish psych, and for 2021’s ButtErfly 3000, a masterclass in Kraut-y synth-pop. While offroad and isolated under Melbourne’s stringent lockdowns, they all but completed a rap record; fortunately, perhaps, post-lockdown glee instead prompted this April’s Omnium Gatherum, documenting back-in-the-room jamming on a stockpot of varied ‘misfit’ song ideas.
While this month’s other two LPs have their purposes (Laminated Denim provides two 15-minute incidental tracks for live shows;
Changes finesses a stalled 2017 conceptual song-cycle of West Coast whimsy), Ice, Death… is the main attraction, continuing Omnium…’s lead towards a more improvisational Gizzard, across 64 thrillingly wiggy minutes.
For these week-long sessions, no music whatsoever pre-existed, just seven titles picked from Mackenzie’s notebook: each was ascribed a bpm according to its ‘vibe’, as well as one of the seven modes that govern Western music’s major scale (phrygian, mixolydian, etc), and duly jammed on for one working day apiece. From each day’s endeavour, Gizzard’s chief collaged seven compositions, later overdubbing brass, guitar, organ, percussion and vocals.
The key difference is that the King Gizz combo, so intensely drilled and hyperactive these past 10-plus years, are finally allowed to loosen up, breathe, and show off their chops. Joyful African highlife-style fingerpicking, possibly from all three guitarists in turn, weaves through opener Mycelium, while drummer Michael ‘Cavs’ Cavanagh drives 10-minute Ice V’s stuttering, Tony Allen-worthy Afrobeat groove, which majestically unfolds through guitar duels, transported chants and visions of a frost descending over Earth, while “crimson clouds are raining blood”.
Such forebodings of eco-catastrophe often dominate Gizzard records, and Ice, Death… scarcely deviates, but on Lava (“sticky like peanut butter”), such primordial imagery soon resolves into a blissful mantra on the circle of life and mortality. Similarly, 13-minute centrepiece Hell’s Itch wanders all manner of proggy landscapes, but, like White Denim gone Vertigo swirl-label, it remains soul-stirring and uplifting throughout.
With its major keys, funky breakbeats, scorching guitar solos and soothing flutes, here’s one Gizzard magnum opus not to miss in the deluge.