KG Review

After listening through King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s new live album yesterday, today was the turn of their new studio record, simply titled K.G.

KGATLW approach making music in a different way to any band that I know, in that rather than being “genre-defying” or “genre-bending” as might be said of a lot of other artists, they tend to simply switch up what genre each album is going to be. There is always the signature King Gizz sound rooted in psychedelic & prog rock, but they have a thrash album, a boogie rock album, a jazz fusion album, a prog metal album, and now not one but two microtonal albums, both of which feature a lot of Eastern influences. This new one… is so good.

K.G. sticks to a specific sound or genre much less than previous records, and instead meanders between them, featuring electic elements from their discography present together in a single project for the first time. While KGATLW’s music always has some aspect of it to make it recognizable as their own, they haven’t really had a distinctive sound due to their experimentation, but this album feels like it might be it. It’s ambitious and might well have been a mess, but instead King Gizz have crafted a gem, an aural kaleidoscope which would definitely be the perfect soundtrack to an acid trip, if you were into that kind of thing.

Admittedly it’s not necessarily accessible, in part because of the microtonality, so I’m not sure I’d recommend it for first time King Gizz listeners, but other than that my only complaint is that it isn’t long enough. 9/10.