3 out of 5

Label: Flightless Records

Produced by: Paul Maybury (engineer)

So this is the band that’s been getting all the hype, the one that sounds like The Hives?  Yeah – remember those early 00s, when rock revival was king, and a million and one bands were the new momentary Thing that graced Spin’s cover (or a smaller “indie” mag if you were still aiming for street cred) – methinks King Gizzard would’ve stormed over the lot back then.  And I’m being reductive: they do quite a bit of storming on their debut, 12 Bar Bruise, and it’s awash in more rock chops than most of those other bands ever displayed, with its hefty, 9000% reverb and splashes of keys hinting toward the psychedelia they’d bring in on later albums to mix with this attack of noisy hooks.  But that’s the thing: the band gained quite a bit of notoriety due to their exhaustive output, and the way they’d continue to envelop and embrace various guitar-laced genres along the way, and it had to start somewhere, before 2017’s five-albums-in-one-year pledge, beyond aping metal, and jazz flourishes, and etc., and so here we are, kinda sounding like The Hives, and other blitzed out garage rockers.

As such, we get an effect that was common (to me) of releases from rock revival groups: a slew of energy that gets you through a handful of tracks, and then a tapering off as things kinda start to sound the same.  KGatLW kinda stack things against themselves by recording mostly in the same register – same hazed out vocals; same fuzzy guitar, same crisp and rolling drums – but it does work well with their brash attack, and so our first few tracks are an outright riot.  By Garage Liddiard, though, you’ve mostly heard what the album has to offer – okay, excepting the spaghetti Western narrative of Sam Cherry’s Last Shot, again hinting at things to come – with vocalist Stu Mackenzie recovering some of his mealy-mouthed energy late in the album for the fun Uh Oh, I Called Mom.

While their underground notoriety is well-earned over the course of their several following albums, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard weren’t especially game changers right from the get-go, though they showed a skillful ability to rock the heck out.