A Magic Spell

When pundits discuss prolificacy amongst recording artists they often cite the halcyon days of yore when high profile bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys would churn out two – sometimes even three – albums in a year, rushing to satiate the massive demand for their product in a nascent pop market where they were yet to experience any substantial competition. For the most part, though, those days of such creative freedom are well and truly over – unless, of course, you're multi-headed Melbourne psych exponents King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, in which case (as their name suggests) you just do as you damn well please.

The esoteric seven-piece dropped their debut long-player 12 Bar Bruise in September last year, then followed that up with the awesome spaghetti western-inspired concept opus Eyes Like The Sky less than six months later. Now they've capped an incredible creative streak by releasing their excellent third album Float Along – Fill Your Lungs barely 12 months on from introducing their debut. Anyone can churn out music at a rate of knots, but doing so and maintaining quality control throughout the process is no mean feat, something the King Gizzard crew have managed with ease.

“I think we've just being getting more and more into home recording, and just getting deeply kind of obsessed with that,” explains frontman Stu Mackenzie. “It's almost like we accidentally came out with all that material. I think other people might write a bunch of songs and then stress over them and learn them and change them and do all this stuff and then record them after a long time has passed, whereas I think that we're more likely to just write a song and record it that day and do it that way. It's a pretty efficient way of getting shit done.

“I think the band – even if it doesn't come across that way – is first and foremost a recording project. Pretty much all of the songs that we've ever done have come about as a recording first before they've been played live or anything. So it's a recording project more than anything, especially Eyes Like The Sky which is an obvious example of that.”

Mackenzie is King Gizzard's chief songwriter but far from their sole creative force, and he explains that the process has been getting more collaborative – and more piecemeal – as time goes by.

“On Float Along... Cook [Craig – guitar] wrote Pop In My Step, Ambrose [Kenny-Smith – harmonica] and I wrote Let Me Mend The Past together, [opening 16-minute opus] Head On/Pill was pretty collaborative with everybody – probably more than anything we've ever done before, just because it's so long and jammy – and then with the rest of them it's different with every song, just with the arrangements and recording and putting them together,” he outlines. “The recording is mostly not all of us in one place – it's usually a few of us recording some bits somewhere, and then we'll go and record some other shit somewhere else. Then someone comes up with an idea for a keyboard part or something and we'll put that on – it's all very much built around a framework of 'whatever happens happens' kinda thing.

“When we started putting this record together I think the first song we recorded was Head On/Pill, and in a way we built the rest of the album around that. We probably did 15 or 20 tracks – either finished or half-finished – and there's only eight on the album. I think we just found songs that fit with that vibe and just built them around that, so it's vaguely conceptual... it's sort of a sonic and vibe concept. I think we just didn't want to make a punk album, in a lot of ways. Not that we don't want to do that ever again, just that with this album we wanted to make it sonically deep and kind of more psychedelic in the classic sense than we've ever done before – we were working around those vague ideas. And I think just the music we were listening to at the time – we were listening to a lot of T-Rex, although I don't know whether that comes through. I think it does to us, but whether it makes that much sense to anyone else is hard to tell.”

King Gizzard definitely has a core sound – a trippy surf-garage-psych concoction – but there are plenty of deviations into further sonic realms, a trait that Mackenzie explains is entirely conscious.

“Yeah, I like to think that we deliberately try to widen what we're doing,” he smiles. “I reckon that ten years down the track if the band's still going that if we've done whatever we wanted to do, in terms of making whatever kind of style of music we wanted to, that would be cool. Plus I'm semi-ADD so I get bored with things easily and want to do something different all the time.”

And don't bother trying to get to the bottom of King Gizzard's lyrics either...

“I wrote the bulk of the lyrics, but I dunno, it's probably easier for someone else to analyse where they're coming from – for some reason being on the inside of it, it's hard to think, 'What does this all mean?' I suppose there's some central theme, but I'm not a hugely wordy person so in terms of the lyrics I write I want them to be simple and open. I don't like being too personal either, because if I write really personal stuff it just makes me feel sad,” Mackenzie laughs heartily. “That's no fun.”