King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Fishing For Fishies

Even after releasing a mere five albums in 2017, it would be wrong for the ever-prolific ‘Gizzard to have taken too much time off, wouldn’t it? It’d have been almost offensive too, if the Aussie psyche-rockers hadn’t released something as curious and unexpected as this to follow up to that gargantuan year.

‘Fishing for Fishies’ sees the band incalculably balance a distinctly upbeat mixture of hand-clapping Suzi Quatro glam, pastiche blues, and ‘Rumours’-era Fleetwood Mac soft rock, also negotiating dreamy harp flourishes and space-y electronica wanderings in the meantime. A false-start snare-roll opening is just the first of many surprises.

Take ‘Plastic Boogie’, for example. It’s nuts. A tirade against plastic over-consumption, (“It’s gonna be brutal if we don’t fuck all of that plastic”), the song pairs twangy blues riffs with an almost shocking High School Musical-esque teeny chorus, before resolving itself effortlessly in one of their trademark rock-outs.
So sweet, puckishly colourful and genre-dizzying is this 13th effort, that it’s like a motorised adventure through the topologically muddled yet enchanting landscapes of a Mario Kart universe - deserts one minute, icecaps the next, concluding at one of Bowser’s perilous volcano-citadels no doubt, with its flesh-singeing lava and swinging axes.

Closer ‘Cyboogie’, the cheesy, sci-fi-inspired lead single from the LP, is by far the most tepid of the set, as if marking the roll of the end-credits and a collective sigh of relief. With that being said, do not doubt that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard still know how to kick ass.