King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s reputation as a vinyl pressing plant in human form is an endless source of both intrigue and fatigue. But the Melbourne psych-rock ensemble’s latest record forces us to consider a prospect even more unfathomable than releasing 20 albums in 10 years (five of them in the past 18 months alone): This hyper-prolific group is also sitting on a ton of unreleased material. Where many records in King Gizzard’s discography center on some grand idea—be it an exploration of specific guitar tunings or a thrash-powered song cycle about our planet’s looming self-destruction—Omnium Gatherum is a double LP whose great concept is that there’s no great concept. (That fearsome title, emblazoned in a demonic font on the cover, is actually just Latin for “a collection of miscellaneous things.”) But while the album was originally an excuse for the band to fine-tune tracks that didn’t previously make the cut, it sparked yet another songwriting surge, yielding a bunch of new songs to complement those leftovers. Even when King Gizzard are trying to retrace their steps, they can’t help but barrel forward.
Case in point: The album’s lead track, “The Dripping Tap,” is a quintessentially Gizzardian Neu!-metal rave-up that had been kicking around since 2018, but it didn’t yield a definitive version until the band dusted it off last June at its first post-lockdown jam, after working remotely throughout the pandemic. The recording they captured that day is absolutely buzzing with all that pent-up communal energy: The track runs for a staggering 18 minutes but feels like it blazes by in a quarter of that time, its blitzkrieg momentum pushing the group to new heights of majestic shredding that suggest Thin Lizzy gone prog. But if you’re wondering whether you really need another high-octane King Gizzard blowout about the ravages of fossil-fuel dependency, “The Dripping Tap” instantly distinguishes itself by teeing up bandleader Stu Mackenzie’s machine-gunned, broken-record chants with a surprisingly soulful chorus hook from multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith that sounds like it was cut in some early-’70s Gamble and Huff session. As a result, “The Dripping Tap” undercuts its musical madness with a genuine sense of sadness—over the precarious state of the world, the suits who stand to profit from its decline, and the willful, widespread ignorance that breeds inaction.
“The Dripping Tap” serves a strategic purpose beyond merely documenting King Gizzard’s return to peak horsepower. By devoting Omnium Gatherum’s entire first side to a signature warp-speed workout, the band gives itself free rein to do anything but that over the record’s remaining three acts. As such, Omnium Gatherum lacks the satisfying fluidity and holistic interconnectivity of King Gizzard’s definitive statements; splendorous synth-pop reveries like “Magenta Mountain” (which feels like it was spun out of the same cocoon as last year’s blissful Butterfly 3000) rub up against tracks that revert to the doomsday-metal battle plan of 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest (“Gaia,” “Predator X”). And where the band’s best records tend to build toward some cataclysmic climax, Omnium Gatherum peaces out with a serene but slight lounge-pop mini-suite (“Candles”/“The Funeral”) that feels like the musical equivalent of discreetly ghosting your own house party.
That said, the benefit of traveling without a roadmap is that you can wind up in some delightfully unexpected places. After teasing his flow on Butterfly 3000’s “Killer Year 2.02,” Kenny-Smith steps out as 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 smooth: The band finds its natural funky footing in the sort of weed-hazed sampledelic grooves favored by early-’90s Beastie Boys, Avalanches, and Edan, while Kenny-Smith’s breathless brat-rap treatises about witches and grim reapers (complemented by vocal snippets of his 97-year-old grandmother) fit squarely within the group’s established parameters of apocalyptic prophecy and brain-scrambling absurdity.
If Omnium Gatherum is a crazy quilt by design, it’s ultimately threaded together by some of the Gizzard’s most sumptuous songcraft to date—not to mention the band’s ever-colorful ways of telling us that the Earth is fucked. The piano-twinkled soul-jazz of “Kepler-22b” provides the lustrous backdrop to Mackenzie’s stargazing fantasy of moving to the namesake planet to get away from this one, while guitarist Joey Walker’s dreamy quiet-storm bass-slapper “Ambergris” speaks of oceanic waste from the perspective of a whale who’d rather be harpooned than live its life swimming through the murk. (That said, no poetic license was required for “Evilest Man,” a giddy swirl of jaunty sunshine-soul, Kraftwerkian synth clusters, and interstellar guitar noise wherein Mackenzie cheerfully assails the most insidious Australia-bred pollutant on our planet—i.e., Rupert Murdoch.)
If the sheer abundance of songs, styles, and lyrical concepts on Omnium Gatherum is indicative of a band that never takes a break, the album also shows that the least these dudes can do is take a break from being themselves. And for around four minutes, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ease off the doomscrolling psychedelia and subversive soft rock to deliver “Persistence,” a joyous folk-funk shuffle that proves Kevin Parker hasn’t cornered the Aussie market on breezy, beach-bound jams. It may seem odd that an album that begins with an epic 18-minute assault on oil addiction also yields a car-fetishizing pop song where Mackenzie celebrates his (ahem) stamina by comparing his performance to “a Ford motor piston.” But as Mackenzie assures us, he’s got “no want for gas/I run on love”—a line that applies as much to his endurance in his band as in his bed. After all, you can’t make 20 albums in a decade without a lot of love for what you do, and—in lieu of any other unifying principle—Omnium Gatherum proves King Gizzard still have a whole lot of it left in the tank.
