Oddments

King Gizzard’s fourth album in 18 months is a safe reflection on their canon to date, writes LACHLAN KANONIUK. It may never quite soar, but it never falters either.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] It’s tough out there for a rock ‘n’ roll band. The long way to the top is almost impossibly so, bands dissipating before lift-off, on an ostensible high or sliding into ill-defined stasis (ECSR, Royal Headache). Longevity isn’t paramount to success, but it appears to be an increasingly elusive prospect for non-solo acts, especially in a spacious country with relatively limited touring prospects.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a band doing it right in the 2010s, possessing tangible savvy and consistently shifting stylistic focus. Emerging from their formative stint as a collective – one with a loosely fluctuating roster – they consolidated their lineup of seven for their debut EP of adept garage belters, Willoughby’s Beach. They’ve upheld a remarkably prolific output since, with Oddments marking their fourth album proper.

The ambition isn’t limited to the King Gizzard umbrella, the group acting as spearhead for a surreptitious and steady Anglesea-region invasion into the nation’s rock capital. Gizz members have germinated into a handful of auxiliary projects – most notably the Ambrose Kenny-Smith-fronted Murlocs, plus Stu Mackenzie’s snare duties on rising folkie Fraser A Gorman’s Big Harvest. Percussionist Eric Moore helms the band’s nascent in-house label Flightless, cultivating a stable of likeminded young acts alongside King Gizzard’s ascension. It’s a studious ethic, belying the initial greened-out stoner shades of their debut EP and its bemoaning cries of “They make me get up in the morning”.

Oddments, like the conceptual full-length Eyes Like the Sky before it, lands in a space outside the conventional boundaries of the contemporary record-promote-release-tour cycle. It doesn’t feel rushed, but there’s a levity that runs the risk of being interpreted as stopgap. It’s a mellow, washy kaleidoscope – the majority of which could have easily passed for Stu MacKenzie solo material, especially when compared to the all-in opus of the previous album’s ‘Head On/Pill’.

“There’s a warm, vintage weirdness sprouting to the fore.”

Opener ‘Alluda Majaka’ serves as a Tollywood sequel to Eyes Like the Sky, the sample-driven groove and soulful organ garnished with carryover neighing-horse soundbites. It’s a welcoming jam, though a strange introduction for Oddments – but incongruence could be the point. The album’s closing, 25-second theme song would have made more sense at the top of the tracklist, considering its offhand throwback to the garage scrap of Willoughby’s Beach.

Those flashes of up-tempo jams are comically short, as if to indulge and expel Thee Oh Sees comparisons simultaneously. That John Dwyer-esque falsetto yelp is present on ‘Hot Wax’, countered by a stoic, Fred Schneider-imitating vocal drone. There’s a warm, vintage weirdness sprouting to the fore. A sweet ode to a salty subject, ‘Vegemite’ beholds an irrepressible charm akin to The Beach Boys’ ‘Vegetables’ or, more recently, Ariel Pink’s ‘Schnitzel Boogie’, imbuing nostalgic rosy-cheeked Australiana into childlike foodstuff appreciation.

Oddments’ strength lies in its tonal cohesiveness, tying together a jack-knifing summary of King Gizzard’s stylistic leaps to date with a permeating sense of warmth – it can be as simple as the raindrops drizzled on the arpeggio acoustic plucks found on ‘Homeless Man in Adidas’. It’s a reductive honing of craft, stripping back to find lushness, a pruning more so than a razing of King Gizzard’s trademark frenetic energy.

There’s little in the way of spectacle within Oddments, but it doesn’t establish the promise of spectacle. It does what it says on the tin (or Vegemite jar), never really soaring yet never really faltering. A safe and psychedelic reflection on the King Gizzard canon to date, acting as an ellipses following last year’s more fully realised Float Along – Fill Your Lungs, or perhaps an immediate colon preceding what’s next. History indicates we won’t have to wait long.

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‘Oddments’ is out now through Flightless/Remote Control. Remaining tour dates below.

Fri, April 4 – Bridge Hotel, Castlemaine, VIC [w/Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk]
Sat, April 5 – Karova Lounge, Ballarat, VIC [w/Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk]
Sun, April 6 – Barwon Club, Geelong, VIC [w/Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk]
Wed, April 9 – Small Ballroom, Newcastle, NSW
Thurs, April 10 – Roller Den, Sydney, NSW
Fri, April 11 – Gumball Festival, Sydney, NSW
Sat, April 12 – FBi Social, Sydney, NSW
Sun, April 13 – Farmer & The Owl Laneway Party, Wollongong, NSW