Fishing For Fishies - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: Review

King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard

are an Australian psych rock band who have made a name for themselves exploring unique concepts and a prolific album release schedule. Their first big breakthrough came in 2016 with Nonagon Infinity a high energy blistering psych rock album where all of the songs lead into one another for one cohesive listen. They followed the success of this up with a wild 2017 where they promised to drop five albums in one year and delivered. They took a well deserved 2018 off and are back to drop their first project of 2019 with Fishing For Fishes. 

Review by Lavender:
So as you would expect for a band that has dropped so much music in so little time, not all 13 Gizz albums are flawless but given their tight concepts and willingness to experiment they have come up with plenty of worthwhile moments. My love affair with the band started in 2014 when the single Cellophane made its way to me and I quite enjoyed the album I'm In Your Mind Fuzz that it came from. The next year I was totally hooked, first by the gorgeous  acoustic album Paper Mache Dream Balloon and next by the 4 track 40 minute Quarters!. It continued with great projects like Nonagon Infinity, Murder Of The Universe and  Sketches Of Brunswick East but ultimately Fishing For Fishes won't be one of the great highlights of the Gizzverse.

Right off the top it should be said that this album is incredibly, sometimes dreadfully jammy. The songs are consistently underwritten and overplayed, which makes parts of the album feel like they are seriously dragging. Cyboogie was released quite a while before the album was even announced but it was the precursor, or warning rather of what this project would be like. The song has some good ideas and is pretty catchy but has absolutely no business being nearly 7 minutes long. The second half of the song is made up almost entirely of less tightly performed revisions to the core tune, far too many of these tracks here contain one half of an actually written song and then aimless repeating of the refrains until the songwriting is so loose it's time to fade out. Boogieman Sam is a second textbook example of this kind of songwriting and in spite of borrowing from Kid Rock of all places the track isn't even that good when it's actually written.

The other two singles on the other hand take a different approach and one that I enjoy much more. Closer to the aesthetic of Paper Mache Dream Balloon, Fishing For Fishes is a cute opening track and a good single that has a catchy and bouncy refrain, it blends this around some softer instrumentals and a very sweet guitar lick that I like quite a bit. A similar sentiment arises from The Bird Song which matches its catchy refrains and acoustic elements. It was just okay as a single but given its place on the album I like it even more within the context of these songs, but that may speak more to the nature of many of the tunes here.

Thankfully there are two more track here that I came away from positively. This Thing blends the jammy and the acoustic styles of various songs on this album together in a way that is surprisingly effective and includes some stuff you won't catch anywhere else on the album, given its place later in the tracklist I enjoy the inclusion. Finally Acarine starts off like most of the tracks here but with a little bit of ELO influence included, just as it gets close to a sleepy point in the song they work in this crazy and out of the box electronic section that sounds like nothing else on the album at all. It seems like a slightly tamer version of a Daft Punk song of all things but the band actually executes it well and turns a forgettable song into a decent one.

There are a trilogy of tracks in the middle of the album that do some significant damage to it as a complete listen when they come back to back to back. Plastic Boogie is one of the roughest tracks here that aims for a very loud sound but the underwhelming performances both vocal and instrumental don't do a whole lot for it. It has layers but the track is so underwritten that they mainly aren't even worth diving into. This is followed by The Cruel Millennial a track with clear influence from 60's rock and a little bit from The White Stripes, neither of which are executed very well. And finally Real's Not Real has a bouncy instrumental intro but slows to a halt for the verses. This, like many of the songs here just isn't the kind of music you come to King Gizz for, and there is a pretty clear reason why.

So obviously this isn't the best Gizz project to date or anything essential to their canon, unless of course you believe in the Gizzverse which I don't even have the time to get into. But the album is one of their ideas that didn't hit in quite the same way as some of their best and I will be looking forward to what the band does next, but this, to me, isn't their shining moment. 4.5/10

Best Track: Fishing For Fishes

For more indie rock check out my review of Foxygen's Seeing Other People here.