Christmas came early this year for the Gizzhive. Beyond embarking on their first North American tour since the pandemic began, the ever-industrious King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard gifted their faithful with three new records released over the course of four weeks this past October. These arrive a mere six months after the band’s most recent double album, which followed hot on the heels of another record, bringing their grand total of 2022 albums to five, matching the feat they first pulled off in 2017. At this point, being a King Gizzard fan is pretty much a full-time job.
You almost wonder if the Melbourne sextet is actively trying to corner the market: By displaying an equal facility with psychedelia, prog, garage-punk, jazz, kosmische musik, thrash metal, synth pop, and even rap, King Gizzard have essentially become the big-box one-stop for all your musical needs. And as anyone who’s braved Costco on a Saturday can tell you, an abundance of choice is liable to pull your attention in too many directions at once. The decision to unload a trio of records in near-tandem arguably does the greatest disservice to Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, which, if given more room to breathe as a standalone release, would more easily stick out as one of the best front-to-back records in the entire Gizzard catalog.
That may not seem obvious when you’re greeted by the album’s deceptively twee opener, “Mycelium,” a song so immersed in nerdy science-speak, it should come with a complementary head lamp. (Plenty of King Gizzard tunes make you want to take mushrooms; this one encourages you to study them, too.) But the song’s beach-bound vibe ultimately proves irresistible, its aquatic guitar lines, hiccuping reggae beats, and lustrous woodwinds enticing you to join the conga line even as main vocalists Stu Mackenzie and Ambrose Kenny-Smith start analyzing the more grotesque byproducts of human-fungi interactions. And “Mycelium” is a bellwether of more dramatic mutations to come, as Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record. The album title may read like a word-cloud summary of the Gizzard’s favorite lyrical topics, but its songs chart new paths to the outer cosmos without leaning on the usual motorik thrusters.
The question of whether or not King Gizzard are a jam band has stuck to this group like the scent of patchouli on a hemp poncho, and Ice, Death justifies the claims of both the yea and nay camps. Certainly, this is one of their loosest, most sprawling records, with almost every track exceeding seven minutes; on the other hand, even the most outré odysseys are less a product of improvisation than intricate arrangement. When the Afrobeat-steeped “Ice V” and the dizzying 13-minute showstopper “Hell’s Itch” settle into their fleet-footed grooves and start introducing new ideas every 16 bars, the effect is less like a band showing off their chops and more like rotating MCs chiming in with a few rhymes on a posse cut. And where past Gizzard epics have embraced a racetrack construction, whipping in and out of recurring motifs at regular intervals, the mischievous “Magma” is built more like a spiral staircase, its guitar accents and frisky rhythms swirling skyward en route to the cataclysmic, wah-wah-splattered finale. Its sequel “Lava” works up to similarly awesome heights, then busts through the ash clouds to reveal a ray of hope. “The volcano is death, the lava is death/Death is life! The lava is life!” Mackenzie repeats with nursery-rhyme glee, summing up the cycle of life that undergirds King Gizzard’s usual apocalyptic premonitions: Our species may be fucked, but the planet will be reborn.
Read More: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava / Laminated Denim / Changes