In 2010, Peter Gabriel shared a theory that many artists have held since time immemorial: “Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write.” That same year, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard embarked on a journey of building a self-contained universe of demented prog and acid-fried freak-outs. It might be realms apart from “Solsbury Hill” and much of their own catalog, but the dreamy ease of Butterfly 3000 makes the Gabrielian promised land of “happy music” seem close at hand.For all their forward motion, the Melbourne band specializes in a certain mazy non-linearity. On albums like Nonagon Infinity and Flying Microtonal Banana, they created diversion after diversion, cloaking waypoints for songs deep inside riffs and motifs. Butterfly 3000 flips the script by offering up one 44-minute suite, written mainly in a major key, and created with the intent to be listened to as one continuous piece. But the big curveball here goes beyond structure and form: Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences. What their Reddit-dwelling diehards refer to as the “Gizzverse” now allows for some serious self-restraint.The band’s deep abiding love of ’70s rock titans like Yes and Hawkwind has never stood in the way of breaking new ground. Butterfly 3000 filters a fresh range of influences, and is the net result of sharing simple ideas—mainly modular synth loops—in lockdown. Opener “Yours” weds drummer Michael Cavanagh’s far-out 4/4 stomp with silken arpeggios, evoking Ashra or Trans Am at their most zonked. But the showpiece is “Interior People,” with its bubbling synths and unrestrained Neu! worship. It’s the closest King Gizzard have come to reimagining kosmische in their image. Mackenzie's acoustic phrases here, and on the likes of “Shanghai,” make the absence of electric guitar feel curiously trivial.
Mackenzie’s lyrical themes have veered between scenes of cyborgs, altered beasts, and necromancers puppeteering the undead. On Butterfly 3000, he pares back the batshit, and peers inward to fixate on dreams and metamorphosis. By mirroring the fragmentary nature of sleep with songs that mention the lens flares of the subconscious and falling upwards through clouds of glue, the frontman becomes oddly relatable. “Black Hot Soup” suggests tasting infinity can’t happen in the land of the living and on “Blue Morpho,” Mackenzie incants about a “hand outstretched” calling his name. But it’s “Dreams” where his disdain for waking life is most lucid. Above pitch-bent melodies, its refrain (“I only wanna wake up in my dream/I only feel alive in a daze”) distills the album’s heavy-eyed energy.As closer “Butterfly 3000” comes to a sudden halt, the microtonal magic of King Gizzard’s recent double album, K.G./L.W, may as well be a mirage. Butterfly 3000 lands like a conceptual arrival point, and makes the band’s more elaborate—and relentless—career peaks that little bit more emphatic. Above all else, it’s a reminder that King Gizzard usually peak when wandering far beyond a clear-cut path. The coming of their most concise and carefree release truly could not have been better timed.
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