King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard touches down with the brilliant Phantom Island
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
For the uninitiated, this is as intimidating a band to get into as there is.
I know I felt that, slowly absorbing their albums, which I liked, one and all, genres jumping and tempos flaring, but feeling that tinge of impostor syndrome all the while because I didn’t know if I really understood what was happening.
Then I saw the band, and everything clicked. And I dove deeper into the catalog, taking in demos and live shows and delving further into the lore. That kind of listening requires dedication and motivation, and not everyone may be up for that kind of commitment.
But, thankfully, there’s a new door to their world that is much more open, welcoming and accepting. It’s this album, Phantom Island, a stunning bit of work that, in the space of 10 songs and about 45 minutes, should convince anyone with ears of their collective worth.
Their onslaught of material has already made for a career catalog. With records sometimes arriving three at a time within a month, they’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground in a relatively brief period, flowing through styles with both an ease and expertise that can make it easy to miss just how solid — just how flat out great — the songs and records are.
Which brings us to Phantom Island, their 27th proper album and the symbiotic follow-up to 2024’s Flight b741. Where they went into a more blues and classic rock foundation for that previous record, here they took the time to augment these 10 songs (recorded at the same time as Flight b741) with full orchestral arrangements. But instead of sounding like so many bands that just decided to step in front of a symphony and call it a day, here, King Gizzard has taken an almost George Martin-like approach, tailoring each arrangement around each song to create a fuller soundscape that is still natural.
And I don’t use the George Martin analogy lightly, because in listening to this for more than a month now (because I still feel almost under-qualified to talk about this band, in the same way I would get intimidated by Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, say), I just come across feeling as if this is how the Beatles would’ve handled arrangements on these songs. It’s not as if songs like “Penny Lane” or “Eleanor Rigby” or “I Am the Walrus” were advertised with “Now with Orchestra!” stickers slapped on their covers. It was just a natural evolution of their process that those songs began to become more ornate in their dress.
The record flows as mostly a piece, beginning on the title track, where the plane from Flight b741 has touched down on our metaphorical island and the loose collection of stories and moods begin to take shape. It turns into almost a party on “Deadstick,” where the plane has crashed, everyone has survived and the horns are blaring in that delirious kind of adrenaline-fueled celebration of having survived a traumatic event. But with “Lonely Cosmos,” the reality of being stranded and alone, looking for someone to connect with, or someone to share these emotions and feelings, are beginning to grow.
And that’s the central theme of the album. The band has been on this incredible journey for the past decade or so, making music, putting on shows, building their own little universe and finding success along the way, artistic and otherwise. But it has to be dizzying to be constantly moving, constantly shifting and adapting with that kind of speed.
By the time the closing “Grow Wings and Fly” arrives, the textures and melodies are shifting and the themes of growing up, moving on and continuing towards something new and undiscovered are reaching their peak. With the three-headed monster of Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker and Ambrose Kenny-Smith all trading verses, while the strings flow in and out of a song that had itself grown onstage out of their previous song “Shanghai,” it’s hard not to feel like this isn’t the logical conclusion to a modern, mature masterpiece.
There are all kinds of hints and references in the lyrics, in this song and throughout the record, that call back to myriad Gizzard songs and build on the mythology that this band has built up in rapid time (not to mention all the Easter eggs hiding in the Jason Galea’s cover art). That’s all good fun for the hardcore fans, and it gives the casual listener something else to seek out if a dedication to the band grows.
But those are all all sidelines to the plain fact that this is just an incredible record on its own. Put it on at a party or while you’re hanging out with a few close friends. By the end, the conversation will turn into nothing but comments of “what was that?” and “put that on again.” Building in the lore of the band is impressive and cool, but crafting an album this good and this advanced is another feat in itself.
So, knowing how intimidating it can be to jump feet-first into a band’s work when there’s this much to digest, I can say simply: just pop this one on the turntable. Find it on your favorite app. Give it space and let it play, and then let it play again. And see if you don’t soon realize that hours have gone by, time has slipped away and this record is still filling the air with its own special magic.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com