That said, the benefit of traveling without a timetable is that you may end up in some nicely unexpected places. After teasing his flow further Butterfly 3000In “Killer Year 2.02,” Kenny-Smith appears as the band’s resident MC on two hip-hop-rooted clips, “Sadie Sorceress” and “The Grim Reaper.” And the transition to King Gizzy & the Leezy Weezy turns out to be surprisingly smooth: the band finds its natural funky foothold in the kind of weed-colored sampledelic grooves preferred by the Beastie Boys, Avalanches and Edan from the early ’90s, while Kenny- Smith’s breathless lad rap essays on witches and grim reapers (supplemented with vocal excerpts by his 97-year-old grandmother) fit perfectly within the group’s established parameters of apocalyptic prophecy and brain-twisting absurdity.
If Omnium Gatherum is a crazy quilt by design, it’s ultimately threaded together by some of Gizzard’s most lavish singing art to date – not to mention the band’s always colorful ways of telling us that Earth is fucked. The piano-glittering soul-jazz from “Kepler-22b” provides the shining backdrop to Mackenzie’s stargazing fantasy of moving to the planet of the same name to get away from it, while guitarist Joey Walker’s dreamy, quiet storm-bass flapper “Ambergris” talking about oceanic waste from a whale’s perspective that would rather be harpooned than live its life swimming through the darkness. That said, no poetic license was required for “Evilest Man”, a dizzying vortex of happy sunshine soul, Kraftwerkian synth clusters and interstellar guitar noise, with Mackenzie cheerfully attacking the most insidious Australia-derived pollution on our planet – ie. Rupert Murdoch.)
If the sheer abundance of songs, styles and lyrical concepts on Omnium Gatherum is a sign of a band that never takes a break, the album also shows that the least these guys can do is take a break from being themselves. And in about four minutes, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard relax with the doomsday psychedelia and subversive soft rock to deliver “Persistence,” a joyful folk-funk-shuffle that proves Kevin Parker has not run the Australian market on a windy Beach. jam. It may seem strange that an album that begins with an epic 18-minute attack on oil addiction also yields a car fetishizing pop song in which Mackenzie celebrates his (ahem) endurance by comparing his performance to “a Ford engine piston.” But as Mackenzie assures us, he has “no want for gas / I run on love” – a line that applies just as much to his endurance in his band as in his bed. After all, you can not make 20 albums in a decade without a lot of love for what you do, and – instead of any other unifying principle –Omnium Gatherum proves that King Gizzard still has a whole lot left in the tank.
Contents
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.