Album Review: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Oddments

Another day, another King Gizzard release. The seven-headed beast is back with Oddments, a brace of songs that marks their fourth LP in two years. Churning out material at high velocity has worked well until now – the garage dirge fun times of 12 Bar Blues, the idiosyncratic Spaghetti Western spoken word head-trip Eyes Like The Sky, and the psych-tinged playground Float Up – Fill Your Lungs have all been received exceptionally well. But pumping out albums at a lightning pace doesn't always equal quality, and Oddments stands as an unintentionally prescient validation, as the album struggles to hang together, a warped paisley psych melange of diminishing returns.

Alluda Majaka kicks things off with a '60s instrumental smash-grab of influences, sounding like The Avalanches going sample happy in an overpriced “vintage” antiques shop – not bad, but not heartening. Vegemite is a cute oddity that grates three listens in, whilst fanciful interludes like ABABCd or Pipe-Dream feel more realised than some of the actual songs (Sleepwalker is, in another unfortunate irony, rather lazy in its appropriation of era-specific psych-pop and somehow too long in just over three minutes).

The sleepy warble of Work This Time is a clear sign of what this band can do, and the production brilliantly evokes a time capsule quality to these songs. Nevertheless, Oddments doesn't leave much to grasp onto. Six-month turnarounds can be great, but even great proliferators like Robert Pollard or John Dwyer need to take the foot off the pedal once in a while.