This month the ascendant shape-shifting rock group from Melbourne, Australia, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard got an early start on announcing their jump to arena rockers with a slate of US shows at big venues in 2024.
As King Gizzard continues to climb in the world of rock stardom, some of their past accomplishments have perhaps been overlooked or underappreciated. Case in point, a double LP the band released in the spring of 2022, Omnium Gatherum, is one of the most audacious and challenging recording projects a band has ever undertaken. Omnium Gatherum’s numerous accomplishments and awesomeness warrant appropriate recognition and praise.
This has yet to happen. The album received largely tepid reviews when it was released in the spring of last year. Pitchfork and Allmusic gave it a middling C, as did review-aggregator Metacritic. YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano scored it a 6 out of 10. Rolling Stone relegated it to an “albums to hear” section and didn’t even give it a full review.
The record did score a few positive, albeit brief, reviews, and appears to be warmly appreciated by the band’s fans core fans. In fairness, this very prolific group released five records in 2022, and Omnium Gatherum is one of twenty-four studio albums the band has now released in total. Keeping up with King Gizzard can be something of a hobby or a part-time job.
However, the unique and august qualities of Omnium Gatherum warrant a little more of a fleshed-out and demonstrative appreciation of the record for the record as the band enters a higher orbit.
Not all big and bold record projects quite pulled it off or lived up to expectations. Some notable (and debatable, of course) examples of this are Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, Lou Reed & Metallica’s – Lulu, or the last several few projects released by the artist Ye.
A starting point of emphasis for this record: it works.
What makes Omnium Gatherum so different and special? Let’s dig into it, starting with:
ECCENTRICITY AND INSTRUMENTALISM
An ethnomusicologist or musically inclined Reddit user might break down the genres of songs on Omnium Gatherum into a rainbow of different colors and flavors. But a more straightforward categorization is sufficient to prove the point about the record’s uniqueness. The album boasts: psychedelic rock, pop rock, prog rock, rap music, and metal. And for good measure one of those psychedelic rock songs is a long-form piece.
Another record with all of these musical genres—as well as a marathon rock anthem– contained on the same album does not exist. We’re in an undiscovered country here, to borrow some parlance from Star Trek.
In the internet era of swiftly changing information, spectacle, and accomplishment can be diminished or missed. This era has also undercut the financial incentive for bands to put their heart and soul into creating records in the first place. Long gone are the days of successful bands raking in cash with record sales in what is now a streaming-dominated environment.
There are some songs on Omnium Gatherum that are more worthy of playing on repeat, such as the poppy and catchy Kepler-22B. But none of the songs are skips. And there are bangers a plenty, spanning all these musical genres.
“The Dripping Tap” and “Magenta Mountain” nail the psychedelic rock vibe. “Persistence” along with “Kepler-22b” are some superb pop-rock songs. “Gaia” is some very soulful and bone-tingling metal. “The Grim Reaper” is a tightly woven and flavorful rap song (like – old school rap of the 90s, which emphasized lyrical quality inasmuch as sound). And “Evilest Man” is one hell of a prog-rock anthem.
Another big win for Omnium Gatherum is its varied instrumentalism and use of sound, which is just as diverse as the musical genres on the record. Highlights here include the use of the flute on “Presumptuous” and the use of calypsos in “The Funeral.” Perhaps the best example of this, however, is in the opening track, which will be explored in a moment.
So anyway …. there it is! Let’s take a moment to celebrate the panoply of great music and sound contained in one record. Bing, bam, boom. Well done and way to go.
Now let’s peel back the onion a bit more on a couple of the record’s standout tunes…
THE DRIPPING TAP
It is not often that a band records a track that is around the 20-minute mark. The group best known for doing it is likely Pink Floyd, who delivered two doozies in this category, Meddle’s “Echoes” and the title track off Atom Heart Mother. The Velvet Underground, New Order, and Kraftwork also produced marathon pieces, to name a few.
Coming in at just over 18 minutes, “The Dripping Tap” delivers. The song opens with a soulful and poetic chorus from band member Ambrose-Kenny Smith, which is repeated twice within the piece, first around the six-minute mark and then as a coda. Between the book ends of this chorus is a lot of what could be called free-form jamming, but this jam has a tight structure and tempo which keeps things moving steadily along and in a groove.
The instrumentalism on “Dripping Tap” is also clever and outstanding. Dylan, Zeppelin, and Springsteen made great use of the harmonica intermittently in rock music, but none ever used the instrument as such a steady driving force through a long rock and roll anthem as King Gizzard does here. The use of the wah-wah guitar pedal at times almost feels like it is channeling a digeridoo vibe, apt of course for a band from down under. Later in the piece simple clapping is used to keep the tempo zipping along. Lastly, the gong is employed as a cherry on the cream pie at the end of sections of the song.
The punchline: “The Dripping Tap” is great stuff. In the news media the MO these days is if you want people to pay attention to something and watch it all the way through to make it no longer than about the length of a traffic light. So, the bar for something like “The Dripping Tap” working in 2022 seems noticeably higher than the California Dreaming, 3-TV channel days of the late 60s and 70s when Pink Floyd was cutting records. It meets that bar and then some. For an even deeper dive into “The Dripping Tap “check out classical composer Doug Helvering’s breakdown here
EVILEST MAN
This song is, simply put, one of the best prog rock songs ever recorded. It goes into this bucket with its terse structure and heavy use of synths to anchor the piece at the outset, in a middle interlude, and at the ending.
The first 45 seconds of the song are a musical rocket ship blasting into space, with layered and textured synths joined harmoniously by more synth and finally a rousing inclusion of the drum kit, guitars, and vocals. The piece then settles into a laid-back and feel-good chorus where the lyrics reflect the band’s frequent theme of warning against the dangers of modern technology. Around the three-and-a-half-minute mark, the song takes a detour away from the chorus into even more synth joyousness, an ecstatic musical journey of the mind where riffs interact and bounce from one cosmic point to another. Around the five-minute mark the piece brings us back to the chorus, and then at the six-and-a-half-minute mark takes a grand finale detour into the metal side of Gizzard with a searing heart-pounding guitar-led climax. The song fades out with a last return to a synth that unfurls, dissects, and melts into beautiful nothingness.
Is “Evilest Man” the most memorable prog rock song? Perhaps not. The catchiest? Also no. But in terms of its form and structure and melodic qualities, this electrifying song is built like a musical version of the Sistine Chapel. It’s got big 1812 Overture energy.
Some King Gizzard fans will surely argue that the band has already produced a small library’s worth of great music and that elevating one record above the others is folly. This is all the more astonishing in that frontman Stu MacKenzie is all of 32 years old. Yet no album astonishes and impresses quite as Omnium Gatherum has. It’s also a wonderful listen.
Maybe it was the fog of Covid, or the band’s prolific production, or the confusion and shock of such a bold and different project coming along that made many miss on this record. But the totality of accomplishment here warrants a more demonstrative statement in the year after its release. Thus, with happy ears and no equivocation may it be known:
King Gizzard’s Omnium Gatherum is a masterpiece.
