And what may sound absurd on paper is actually the genius work of a band of musicians entirely simpatico with one another after nearly a decade of constant evolution. Here, perhaps, is a place where the spirit of two key songs released in the same year - Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’ – linger somewhere in the mix. Out of this period came Fishing for Fishies, an album in which musical motifs recur: lush piano, mellotron and synth flourishes (the bulk of the album was written on piano) Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s distinctive harmonica, which brings to mind sidewinders crossing dusty widescreen vistas a generous dose of vocoder and a plethora of creative U-turns that conspire to create a general overall sense of man and machine melding together in a thrilling chrome-covered hybrid.īecause Fishing for Fishies is an album looking out across the horizon through mirrored sunglasses while twenty-tonne juggernauts thunder past. And as soon as it clicked over to 2018 I stopped worrying about recording for a while and started living instead.” For most of the holiday period I was in the studio doing the last of the recording and mixing on Gumboot Soup. “It was a good kind of spent feeling though, as I like being busy. “I didn’t really know who I was by the end of 2017,” continues Stu, of the band’s never-to-be-repeated year, which concluded with the fifth album being released on New Years Eve 2017. This is a collection of songs that went on wild journeys of transformation.” Ultimately though we let the songs guide us this time we let them have their own personalities and forge their own path. “A blues-boogie-shuffle-kinda-thing, but the songs kept fighting it - or maybe it was us fighting them. “We tried to make a blues record,” says frontman Stu Mackenzie. It’s a stomping vocoder-lead anthem akin to Georgio Moroder or Trans-era Neil Young and a triumphant conclusion to an album that is as surprising as it is thrilling, as unexpected as it is effortless. From the soft shuffle Outback country of the opening title track through the sunny easy listening of ‘The Bird Song’ (think the lysergically-soaked Laurel Canyon circa 1973) and on through the party funk of ‘Plastic Boogie’ (which somehow summons the spirit of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions) the road-trucking, Doors-like highway rock of ‘The Cruel Millennial’ and ‘Real Is Real’ - what The Carpenters might have sounded like had they existed entirely on vegemite and weed - it’s a dizzying, dazzling display.Īnd that’s all before we even get to ‘Acarine’, a futurist blues tune which heads off into previously unchartered territories of shimmering Eno-esque ambient and dark John Carpenter-style electro, and the electro squelch of album-closing single ‘Cyboogie’, on which five of the seven King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard members play synths. The thirteenth album since their 2012 debut – and their first following the release of five vastly different albums in 2017 - Fishing for Fishies is a blues-infused blast of sonic boogie that struts and shimmies through several moods and terrains. Where the past and future collide in the beautiful present.
Here is a world where the organic meets the automated where the rustic meets the robotic. Sit back and strap yourself in as seven-headed Aussie rock beast King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard return with Fishing for Fishies, perhaps their most perfectly-realised album to date.