King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Omnium Gatherum

That stated, the advantage of touring with no roadmap is which you can wind up in some delightfully sudden locations. After teasing his circulate on Butterfly 3000’s “Killer 12 months 2.02,” Kenny-Smith steps out because the band’s resident MC on two hip-hop-rooted cuts, “Sadie Sorceress” and “The Grim Reaper.” And the transition into King Gizzy & the Leezy Weezy proves surprisingly easy: The band finds its pure funky footing within the kind of weed-hazed sampledelic grooves favored by early-’90s Beastie Boys, Avalanches, and Edan, whereas Kenny-Smith’s breathless brat-rap treatises about witches and grim reapers (complemented by vocal snippets of his 97-year-old grandmother) match squarely throughout the group’s established parameters of apocalyptic prophecy and brain-scrambling absurdity.

If Omnium Gatherum is a loopy quilt by design, it’s finally threaded collectively by among the Gizzard’s most luxurious songcraft up to now—to not point out the band’s ever-colorful methods of telling us that the Earth is fucked. The piano-twinkled soul-jazz of “Kepler-22b” gives the lustrous backdrop to Mackenzie’s stargazing fantasy of shifting to the namesake planet to get away from this one, whereas guitarist Joey Walker’s dreamy quiet-storm bass-slapper “Ambergris” speaks of oceanic waste from the angle of a whale who’d relatively be harpooned than dwell its life swimming via the murk. (That stated, no poetic license was required for “Evilest Man,” a giddy swirl of jaunty sunshine-soul, Kraftwerkian synth clusters, and interstellar guitar noise whereby Mackenzie cheerfully assails essentially the most insidious Australia-bred pollutant on our planet—i.e., Rupert Murdoch.)

If the sheer abundance of songs, types, and lyrical ideas on Omnium Gatherum is indicative of a band that by no means takes a break, the album additionally reveals that the least these dudes can do is take a break from being themselves. And for round 4 minutes, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ease off the doomscrolling psychedelia and subversive smooth rock to ship “Persistence,” a joyous folk-funk shuffle that proves Kevin Parker hasn’t cornered the Aussie market on breezy, beach-bound jams. It could appear odd that an album that begins with an epic 18-minute assault on oil habit additionally yields a car-fetishizing pop tune the place Mackenzie celebrates his (ahem) stamina by evaluating his efficiency to “a Ford motor piston.” However as Mackenzie assures us, he’s bought “no need for gasoline/I run on love”—a line that applies as a lot to his endurance in his band as in his mattress. In spite of everything, you possibly can’t make 20 albums in a decade with out quite a lot of love for what you do, and—in lieu of some other unifying precept—Omnium Gatherum proves King Gizzard nonetheless have an entire lot of it left within the tank.