King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Omnium Gatherum
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Omnium Gatherum
By: Robert Hill
The 20th entry in their full-length catalog feels like an impromptu road trip with a friend who smokes more weed than you and, somehow, got better grades in school.
It’s challenging to write about any King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard record without discussing each track individually; they’re so disparate.
The mellow gold of a tune like “Magenta Mountain” seethes like a summer night in the city, and you might think you know what’s coming.
But expectations are subverted by the juxtaposition of every song after, shifting from early 90s hip-hop and jazz, to stoner sludge, to smoothed out yacht rock to Ethiopian synth-funk.
Investigating the influences of this album alone could serve as a primer for an education in late twentieth-century alternative music.
The latest installment in the never-ending story of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard records is Omnium Gatherum. The 20th entry in their full-length catalog feels like an impromptu road trip with a friend who smokes more weed than you and, somehow, got better grades in school.
They show up on your porch at ten on a Tuesday and ask if you want to go with them to Portland. You know, a quick trip. And since you don’t have to work tomorrow, you hop in their hand-me-down Toyota Tercel and head to the freeway.
Only half watching the road, steering with their knees, they plug their phone into the wire hanging out of the tape deck, and an on-brand Lizard Wizard epic pumps out, meandering across the radio dial, flipping from Hall & Oates slow jams to swirling Hawkwind-inspired noodle ripper, then digressing a half dozen times before settling into the road trip.
Just over 80 minutes of discovery and light adventure with an unexpected friend, and you’re not sure what you’ll experience or where you’ll end up.
But the opening epic, “The Dripping Tap,” portends more than a quick spin through the radio landscape. It’s also an apt metaphor for the musical ping pong match that follows.
Each song differs so widely from the previous in inspiration and genre that if you’re not paying attention, it sounds like you’re listening to your friend’s likes on shuffle. Then they hand you their vape pen.
Where Omnium Gatherum succeeds is in its hybridity. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard blends genre at will, evading all attempts at pigeonholing the songs into any one category, the only tracks avoiding amalgamation being closer to the heavy end of the rock spectrum.
But the group’s fusion of styles can leave behind the uninitiated in a confusion of pre and post/sub and uber-isms, ducking analysis in favor of a morass of not-quite-secret influences, especially today, with near-limitless access to music on the internet.
While the full depth and breadth of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s musical ability has yet to be plumbed, the sheer diversity of influence suggests infinite possibility and the high-level view of music history that technology provides. Like drinking from a firehose.
All six members of this prolific group are immensely talented, as shown throughout their evolution. And though Omnium Gatherum can feel a bit unfocused with the band’s effortless style switches, their pure creative drive is evident in standout tracks like the pummeling “Gaia” and the blue-eyed soul shuffle of “Persistence.”
Don’t sleep through this one.
