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. That said, the benefit of traveling without a roadmap is that you can wind up in some delightfully unexpected places. 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. 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”).
#KENNY G BREATHLESS REVIEW FREE#
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. “The Dripping Tap” serves a strategic purpose beyond merely documenting King Gizzard’s return to peak horsepower.
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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. 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. 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. Even when King Gizzard are trying to retrace their steps, they can’t help but barrel forward.Ĭase 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. (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. 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.
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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. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s reputation as a vinyl pressing plant in human form is an endless source of both intrigue and fatigue.