Give or take, it has been 14 years since King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, a band whose absurd name matches their absurd output, first began percolating and releasing music as a rock act. This album, (Flight b74), isn’t just a return to down to earth instrumentation and song structure from their nascent garage and surf rock beginnings, but the full album embraces a blues rock sound that has had influence in their albums for quite some time.
Principle and founding members, Ambrose Kenny-Smith and Nicholas “Cook” Craig have had a career parallel to their more famous tenure working on King Gizz albums in the form of a blues band called The Murlocs. Birthed the same year as King Gizz, while their work as Lizard Wizards has been marked by its eclectic, progressive and out there sensibility, The Murlocs were much more down to earth.
Sticking to a raspy harmonica laden rock sound, with Kenny-Smith at the helm on vocals and Craig on bass, the topics typical to Murlocs have been less out there than vomiting computers that murder the universe, and closer to the uneasy emotional states we can find ourselves in, or the subjugation of perspective to youth and now with (Flight b741), we’re seeing that influence taken hand in hand by the rest of their sister band.
Opening on “Mirage City” feedback, a steady drum beat, and a pair of thrumming guitars kick off this 26th studio album, more triumphant than the “Mirage City” turns out to be for its first half. Its first half a lamentation of the state we often find reality in, a disappointing one, bundled up with the hopes for some utopia far away, the titular Mirage City, it shifts with the realization that the dream is just that.
The triumphant second half, doesn’t lament the time lost on the escapism of hoping for a dream that won’t come true, but instead takes the lost hopes in to transmute them in reality into something productive. Coming off the heels of the energy of the energetic bookend that is the end of “Mirage City” is the upbeat, but chill, “Antarctica”, another track for the global warming anthems that have quickly become a staple for album releases by King Gizzard.
Another song about escaping reality, “Antarctica” isn’t alluding to an unfulfilling home life or unfulfilled aspirations, but instead the race from air conditioned building to air conditioned building that’s been getting longer every year. An ode to wishing for cooler days, or at least for them to last longer, in the most hyperbolic of fashions; Antarctica is painted as a freezing paradise where the polar bears roam permafrost plains.
Still, in keeping with the grounded nature of the record, Stu Mackenzie comes in half way through to smash the idea of this cool paradise singing “It’s gonna be a miss, I can tell/We’ve got a snowball’s chance in Hell”, an allusion to the continuously missed climate mitigation goals worldwide. An overall darkened tone that doesn’t stand up to the breezier Raw Feel coming right after.
A personal skip, in spite of its jaunty rhythm, by way of it being a 4 minute version of the “is my green your green your green too” verse from Rhett and Link’s “I am a Thoughtful Guy”. The real highlight of this bid into stoner philosophy being the verse sung by Mackenzie at the end. After comes “Field of Vision” which in its defiant sound gestures vaguely to the idea of a one track pursuit.
Not a skip, but not a highlight either, especially compared to the rick-rollicking “Hog Calling Contest” whose transition segment on “Field of Vision” is the highlight of that song. The song with the title drop in it, “Hog Calling Contest” doesn’t disappoint in its energy. Starting on a chorus calling out the album name, before kicking in with an infectious piano left channel piano startup that gives way to an energetic guitar in the right channel.
From the instrumentation, the harmonization and the pig impressions, the halfway point is weaved to impress in spite of calling to playing in mud and ridiculous paradoxical happenings like pigs flying and turtles winning races. Keeping the momentum up is lead single “Le Risque”, a track that has a French name for no reason that’s about getting the blood pumping.
A good introduction to rustic sound of the album during the roll out, and the first appearance of a vocal performance from longtime drummer Michael Cavanagh, a risk that pays off even if it does change the momentum of the track during his appearance. Following on the heel of daredevilry in lyrical form is the titular “Flight b741”, which neither refers to the title in its run, nor its artwork, instead painting the picture of a romantic, if ill-fated air faring voyage.
Continuing still on that melancholy note is album highlight “Sad Pilot”, detailing the empty life of a commercial airline pilot, and the nagging interference of depression on his job. Day drinking and suicidal ideation call for the narrator with seemingly no end in sight, and the transition to “Rats in the Sky” calls again to animal theming.
The title of the track acting as a euphemism and not being sung from the perspective of an actual rat, but instead a pigeon, in contrast to the existential burden of endless melancholy, the pigeon enjoys the simple things. It lives on instinct, flies and feels free, at first feeling a sense of fear from the man whom it interacts with, lamenting his burdens and thus those of humanity. To live shackled to the ground and high falutin concerns instead of the simple wonders of the physical world.
Finishing off the album is “Daily Blues”, a far less dreary meditation on the dower feelings that can plague us, it asks us to consider the barriers of ideology that can keep us from connecting to one another. Good vibes about trying to shake the miasma of bigotry off collective thought with peace and love play us out as the flight lands.