King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard – what kind of music should you expect from a name that evokes such a surreal image. It is certainly psychedelic, and perhaps rock, but apart from that you can’t really pinpoint a sound, much like their music. In the five years they have been together, each of the seven albums they have created all take their own form loosely around psychedelic rock. Expect the unexpected seems to be the phrase of choice. The Melbourne septet started out as a straight forward garage rock band but have zig-zagged through Fuzz into Prog and Neo-Psych then back to heavy Fuzz and then Jazz… – you get the idea. So where is next?
 
On Paper Mâché Dream Balloon’s announcement, frontman Stu Mackenzie admitted he “wanted to make an album with a collection of short unrelated songs” and “steer away from electric guitar music”, so basically a “concept-less concept album”.
 
The albums start with the smooth and extremely laid back ‘Sense’, almost like the start of a mellow blues/soul record. Soft acoustic guitar, double bass, piano and clarinet is brilliantly not what you expect yet exactly what you would expect – the chorus sings “it don’t make no sense at all”. The lovely opener gears the listener up for an album that is another complete change in the bands direction. The pace picks up for the hippy pop ‘Bone’, featuring a flute hook which is straight from the summer of love before going straight into one of my highlights of the album ‘Dirt’. Following in the same vein, the off-kilter vocal harmonies and its disconcerting sound really signifies Paper Mâché Dream Balloon as their boldest leap of faith so far (much like fellow Australian Psych aficionados Tame Impala’s most recent album, Currents).
The title tracks’ breezy flute sounds makes it hard not to get lost in a whimsical daydream rambling through an endearing airy-fairy King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard dream world. You are then taken into darker realms with the unsettling tone to ‘Trapdoor’, a memorable highlight of their stunning set at Glastonbury 2015. The running away groove with eerie echoing violin and sharp kraut drums is the rush to find light at the end of a tunnel in a trip gone bad, jubilantly found with the joyous sounds of ‘Cold Cadaver’.
 
With the 32 minute album zipping from track to track (averaging at 2:48 a song), ‘The Bitter Boogie’ is an epic in comparison lasting 4:29. It brings T.Rex and Canned Heat together for a pulsing blues jaunt of heady pleasure. Back to the dizzying fast paced trippy folk with catchy chorused ‘N.G.R.I (Bloodstain)’, before going into the questioning 60s psych-pop rhythms of ‘Time = Fate’ and ‘Time = $$$’. Paper Mâché Dream Balloon comes to its close with the penultimate track ‘Most Of What I Like’, an ode to the far out melodies of early Kinks, before ‘Paper Mâché’ nicely (though pointlessly) rounds the album off with an instrumental featuring flute refrains from each of the album’s songs.
 
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard have now released four fantastic albums in two years, as well as prolifically touring. With the latest opus being the biggest step away from their norm, it seems there is no cap on what the band can do and it makes me even more excited for what King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard will bring next time around.
Iain Lauder