IN REVIEW: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - "Omnium Gatherum"

 

I'm not sure how it's possible that I've gone this long without giving an album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard a proper review; my only other mentions of perhaps the most exciting, shape shifting and prolific bands of our time on this blog before this were a haiku review of Fishing for Fishies and a year-end write-up paragraph on Infest the Rats' Nest, both released in 2019. This is wild to me since I fully embraced the chaos of this band two years prior, when they were in the midst of rising to the challenge of releasing five disparate albums within the confines of the year 2017; I suppose it was all just a bit daunting to me based on the sheer volume of the material and the at least partially unexplainable nature of the band's music.

Nevertheless, Omnium Gatherum is KGLW's twentieth album, a staggering achievement considering their debut celebrates its tenth anniversary this fall; the new album's origins are found in scraps, songs left off of the band's recent albums for varying reasons. The story says this was planned as an odds and ends collection, only to be co-opted by renewed jamming that stemmed from the members' first in-person collaboration since the beginning of the pandemic. Rejuvenated and ever creative, the group laid down more tracks to supplement the leftovers, resulting in a double album that covers a wide swath of the band's sonic palette rather than the previous M.O. of focusing their differing vibes into unique, album-length statements.

This, naturally, cements Omnium Gatherum as the group's least cohesive work to date; throughout, the songs dip in and out of the many styles KGLW have performed their dark magic within over the past five years or so. Fans of their earlier, more jam-oriented experiments will immediately gravitate to The Dripping Tap, a behemoth 18-minute opener that sees the players getting ample mileage out of each other's cues and locking into a formidable groove that ensures it's not a waste of anyone's time. Their keyboard-laden psych-pop muscle they showed on Butterfly 3000 is flexed with the majestic, shimmering Magenta Mountain and the nocturnal, eerie Red Smoke. Meanwhile, the guttural metal of Infest the Rats' Nest is present in Gaia and Predator X. 

That said, surrounding these wildly varying styles are what feels like the bones that hold all this connecting tissue in place; many of the album's 16 tracks boast vintage vibes, thick grooves and swinging, percussive beats pop up time and time again, from the bass-heavy banger Kepler-22b through the AM radio soaked slow jam Ambergris, the pulsating space rock Evilest Man (the intro for which finds time for a little Kraftwerk vibe as well), the sun-soaked classic rock swagger of Persistence and the bright boogie of Presumptuous, among others. These songs feel like the skeleton of a cursed KGLW beach party and, without the presence of all these other moods and tones, it probably could have been toted as their Beach Boys and/or Stevie Wonder and/or Grateful Dead and/or Steely Dan record.

Oh yeah, there's also not one but two hip-hop tracks on Omnium Gatherum; Sadie Sorceress and The Grim Reaper are absolutely ridiculous, boasting sonic manipulation, sick beats and decent enough bars. The former has its chorus punctuated by a stabbing organ, while the latter features a stuttering beat and a hook that just consists of said beat and a flute melody. They don't function as much more than distractions, and they feel the most random out of any experiments on the record, but they're fun; I don't, however, think the concept would work on a much larger scale than this, an added sprinkle of flavour on an already overflowing smorgasbord of sound.

It's hard to find an 80-minute album that's all killer and no filler, and not everything works here; The Garden Goblin is only notable in that it's bizarre, and it doesn't add anything of substance to the album, while the following Blame It On the Weather has a pleasant enough groove that can't save an underwhelming vocal delivery. The album also fails to stick the landing, with penultimate track Candles coming off far more repetitive than hypnotic and closer The Funeral simply ending things on a noodly, instrumental note. It's a rather dull, uneventful end to an album that started with a mammoth jam and featured so much variety along its wild ride, only to end with a shrug and a sigh.

In a weird way, though, Omnium Gatherum might be one of the best introductions I can think of for anyone who's curious about KGLW but daunted by the Herculean task of where to start in their staggering, over 14 hour-long discography. It lacks some of their DNA, to be sure (very little, if any, microtonal tuning is used, and there's absolutely no conceptual cohesion attempted), but you simply cannot encapsulate all of what makes this band so special in less than 90 minutes. For fans, it's a wildly uneven experience that nonetheless proves they have an undeniable spark even when working with their own scraps.

April 22, 2022 • KGLW

Highlights The Dripping Tap • Kepler-22b • Persistence