King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – ‘The Silver Cord’ album review: two sides of chaotic electronica
Reviewing King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is almost a pointless task. They’re obviously not a band that awaits star ratings with bated breath. Their ardent fans certainly won’t pay any attention – and the only numbers they seem concerned with far exceed five measly stars. With six members and 25 studio albums to their name, King Gizzard are more concerned with churning out the next Zappa-esque oddity. I cannot think of another band that rivals their prolific output, let alone their sound.
The latter presents a more obvious difficulty because they’ve made a concerted effort to defy categorisation. On a whim, they can churn out thrash metal albums like Infest the Rats’ Nest with the same quality as the bossa-nova and jazz-tinged Sketches of Brunswick East. The ease at which they can do this should paint them into a corner, waiting for the eventual moment they run out of genres, but on The Silver Cord, they somehow manage yet another moment of reinvention.
The new record has 14 tracks, the first seven a small mercy for listeners with shorter attention spans, with brief, three-minute suggestions of songs. The second seven are tracks allowed to fully form, taking up the better part of an hour with their oscillating synths and endless layers of electronica. In keeping with the idea there’s no point really scoring a Gizzard record, a track-by-track analysis is pointless.
Each of their albums is intended as an experience, and if you’re a fan of converging synths set to thumping beats with sprawling, psychedelic vocals referring to vessels and dragons, this is for you. It goes without saying fans of recreational acid use will love it, as will fans of Butterfly 3000, which probably creates its own overlapping Venn diagram.
King Gizzard’s take on electronica should sound like the band at their most modern, drifting away from the hallucinogenic ’70s state they’re best known for, but their take lacks the slick contemporary production, instead sounding like the genre at its most rudimentary, almost like they’re discovering it for the first time.
A lot of this is likely because drummer Michael Cavanagh used an ancient Simmons drum set, a staple from ’80s music videos and an intriguing new toy for the band, who’ve spent entire world tours searching for old instruments. “It has this little ‘electronic’ brain all the drum-pads plug into, and while the sounds it can make are pretty rudimentary, we soon decided we wanted to commit to it as the drum sound for this next record,” explained vocalist Stu Mackenzie.
“We set Cav’s Simmons kit up in the centre of the room,” he added. “And then dragged every synth we had in the practice space or lying about our houses into the studio, and plugged everything in. It was chaotic. It was probably the coolest our studio has ever looked, to be honest.”
While their embrace of electronic equipment isn’t new, the attempt at using it to its fullest in two different time constraints is. The bizarre fusion of electronica, psych-trance and jungle that it results in proves Gizzard haven’t backed themselves into a corner just yet.
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