Australian psychedelic rockers King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard are not slowing down. On the contrary, they announced release of four to five albums this year, and although the third one is already out, I am first going to review the precious one titled Murder Of The Universe.
With the past few albums, they were oriented towards psychedelic and progressive hard rock, and Murder Of The Universe continues the streak. Throughout the album we can hear those characteristic riffs the band hookd us on, but there is also a strong and coherent concept here that King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard are tentative to unravel. In fact, I dare to acknowledge that this album resembles Queen’s Flash and its intention to have a fantastic narrative that does not sound like anything from this planet. They have chosen th battle between good and evil, and humans and monsters as the main theme, while the overall sounds deserves for you to turn up the volume to the maximum.
Innovation comes in form of spoken word sections in which a female voice tells a story about these battles in which humans seem to be on the losing end. Such a narration might kill the flow of the album, but it comes in handy when King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard start sounding repetitive.
The album is split into three parts or let's say three songs. The first one is The Tale of the Altered Beast and it tells us about the fight between good and evil through the prism of a man who wrestles with mutant monster. The whole sections offers intersection of riffs and spoken word, but the final results seems to be lacking edge.
The Lord Of Lightning vs Balrog presents the fight of light and darkness. The band is in the better mood here, they seem creatively franatic and powerful, and the spoken word sections are more congruent to the flow of a song so they don’t interrupt the narrative. No matter how crazy they appear, there is still that underlying feeling that we have heard it all before, so thank God for that female narrator.
The closing segment Han-Tyumi and The Murder Of The Universe deals with alienation of a man in digital era of social media. Their castigation goes well along with the sound of synthetic sounds that penetrate the general discourse.
King Lizard and co are slowly becoming one of those bands that everybody love, but there is also an increase in number of people who don’t understand why is this so good. I applaud to them for being super prolific without embarking on debacle ship, yet there is an impression that they have just created a psychedelic rock formula.
