Album Review: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Phantom Island

Is there a more prolific or chameleonic band on the planet than Australia’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard? Phantom Island is their 27th long player since forming in 2010. Not content to confine themselves to any particular genre, the Melbourne sextet’s career has embraced garage punk, psych rock, jazz, metal, folk and synth-pop, as they prove themselves the band with the lowest boredom threshold on the planet.

With 10 songs left over from sessions for their last outing, the relatively straightforward rock jam of 2024’s Flight b741, they enlisted the help of Chad Kelly, a British historical keyboardist, conductor and arranger who now lives in Australia, and is a mate of chief guitarist/vocalist Stu Mackenzie.

The result is a mad melting pot of orchestral pop, rock, soul and funk that sounds like they’ve taken an already impressive rock/pop blueprint and added an extra dimension or two. It’s like going from silent black and white film footage to 4K high definition with surround sound.

You’ll need a decent speaker/headphone system to grasp even a fraction of everything that’s going on, from the brilliantly poptastic, brass-driven title track to the mid-paced space-rock of ‘Eternal Return’, not unlike MGMT’s proggier moments, or the string-driven Beatles-ish ‘Grow Wings And Fly’.

The brilliantly bats ‘Deadstick’ is built on a strident, ’70s glam groove with a side helping of Stax-esque funk. ‘Lonely Cosmos’ begins like a ballad, but morphs into something entirely more sinuous, a slinky Bowie-inspired space odyssey, while the similarly fluid ‘Spacesick’ veers from loose glam wig-out to trippy psychedelia and soft-rock extravaganza in less than five minutes.

‘Sea Of Doubt’ and ‘Panpsych’ veer a little too close to forgettable, while the Clapton-inspired ‘Silent Spirit’ gets a bit too noodly for its own good, but for the most part, this 10-track journey is a fantastical, magical mystery tour.

8/10

Out now