It’s remarkable that it’s taken this long for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to have their Cypress Hill at Hullabalooza moment. The absurdly prolific Australian sextet’s psychedelic experiments have led it from blown-out garage rock and into some truly unexpected places: krautrock, dream pop, sludge, Middle Eastern-inspired microtonal riffs, bad-trip spoken word, a doom metal concept album about the climate apocalypse. On Phantom Island, their 27th studio album, they lavish their gently trippy compositions with orchestral contributions. The results are occasionally frustrating, sometimes beautiful, and almost always interesting if not entirely lovable.
Written and recorded alongside last year’s fun and anarchic Flight b741, Phantom Island wasn’t written or originally recorded with orchestral arrangements in mind. But, realizing first mixes felt unfinished, and having recently met members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic backstage after a show, the band saw an opportunity for yet another experiment. Inspired by the Philharmonic’s sound, they sent mixdowns to the British conductor Chad Kelly, who wrote elaborate arrangements for the songs and assembled a group of musicians to dub over the original tracks in the studio.
That inbuilt incongruity sometimes makes for enjoyable tension. The louche horns on the title-track opener, for example, call back impressively to the golden age of Blaxploitation soundtracks—even if they’re entirely at odds with the daydreamy verses and final-third freak-out. The violins and flutes on “Sea of Doubt” sound weightless and intoxicating at first, though eventually they distract from some of Stu Mackenzie and Joey Walker’s best country-rock guitars. The lush strings on “Eternal Return” are reminiscent of Morcheeba’s “The Sea”; the theatrical bass vocals and sax solos elsewhere on the song may as well be from another universe.
When the disparate worlds of psychedelia and orchestra do cohere, there are little sparks of magic. The bombastic rock ‘n’ soul of “Deadstick” comes to gleefully chaotic life with a made-for-TV horn section, and “Panpsych” opens with a simple solo flute and a playful guitar before collapsing into a delicious groove. Lucas Harwood’s bass coils itself around the orchestra so deftly on the Revolver-esque “Aerodynamic,” it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. Kelly’s arrangements seem designed to help Phantom Island take flight, like a series of carefully crafted propellers. “If I could have one wish, I’d turn my hands into wings,” Mackenzie sings on “Aerodynamic,” in what could easily be Phantom Island’s guiding axiom.
Still, those moments are fleeting. Often the songs feel overstuffed, with great moments discarded in a hurry to get to something less worthwhile. “Lonely Cosmos” is gorgeous in its stripped-back form, with an acoustic guitar, a viola, and Mackenzie singing about drifting out into space on a potentially eternal mission; it did not need to become a jazz-funk odyssey. “Silent Spirit” has a great country-fried rock song buried under falsetto pronouncements that “time is eating its last meal.” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have earned a cult fanbase that’s followed them through weirder territory than this while keeping weed dealers in business across the English-speaking world. Jumping from thought to thought and probing at squishy hallucinogenic ideas is a feature here, not a bug.
But at their best, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard can engage with enormous science-fiction concepts without drifting from the psychedelic into the obtuse. The best song on Phantom Island, “Spacesick,” is a five-minute mini-opus that takes flight mostly because it maintains its focus. It succeeds where perhaps only two other songs in history have before, expressing (and wielding as metaphor) the unique pathos of watching the earth rise from space. While it may not have the grand, balladic melodies of “Rocket Man” or “Space Oddity,” it does balance an intergalactic ambition with a wit and melody that less skilled songwriters would quickly discard. The crescendoing horns and graceful strings are integral, opening the song up into widescreen. If Mackenzie had been distracted by some nearby shooting star, he might never have come up with a line as poignant as his sign-off there: “To sit on chairs that touch the floor/For that, I'd give it all/Till then, dreaming's all I can do/I love you, over, Stu.” Phantom Island is freewheeling and ambitious, and mostly admirable for it. Pared back slightly, it might have been truly absorbing.
