Progressive Rock
A King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard album is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. So after making a surprising, excellent psychedelic-metal album bordering on thrash metal, “PetroDragonic Apocalypse” (2023), now they go and hand us an electronic record, with no guitars or acoustic drums. Feel free to skip this one and go straight to “PetroDragonic Apocalypse”, which is a killer record.
But the new release here is “The Silver Cord”. It’s worth noting this is a double record, where the second half consists of extended mixes of the seven original songs, which I won’t be covering.
Luckily we’re not in the era where you bought a record because you liked the band, and the moment the needle hit the vinyl you felt like shouting “give me my money back!” along with a few choice curses. Streaming apps spare us these headaches nowadays. Now you listen first, and if you like it, you go to their website and buy something.
And even so, if you’re familiar with the band’s track record, then you really have no room to complain, because this is their modus operandi: doing something radically different every time, regardless of what’s expected of them. That’s good for musical freedom, but dangerous for the listener.
“Thelia” opens the record with a light, trivial little tune that’s nothing special. “The Silver Cord”, on the other hand, recalls Jean Michel Jarre compositions in its opening, preserving the previous track’s rhythmic motif, with a psychedelic voice adding something interesting, before turning into a middle section and a not-particularly-significant ending.
And with a more danceable feel, though not exactly club-ready (it’s been a while since I’ve gone out), we get “Set”, which also brings in a rapped section and some fairly personal melodies, before shifting gears to close things out.
Another fairly dispensable track is “Chang’e”. Look, the thing is, these gentlemen are the vanguard, the cutting edge of the alternative scene, they get booked for Primavera Sound, which is very cool, and it’s true they’ve earned real respectability, since previous records have hit real heights of quality and originality. But this one’s a genuine dud.
And here at Tótum Revolútum Press we have no intention of writing destructive reviews just to get clicks, nor sycophantic ones, since nobody’s “buying” us an article either — so we don’t owe anyone anything. That said, if you look at the reviews published of this album, none of them actually talk about it directly; they just talk in circles around nothing. And when they see the next track is called “Gilgamesh”, they copy some paragraph about the Sumerians straight from Wikipedia, or start musing about the band’s previous work, and so on. They do it because they can’t bring themselves to say this exercise in self-indulgence turned out as horrendous as Radiohead’s “Kid A”, since tomorrow the label would pull every commissioned piece they had lined up.
By the way, “Gilgamesh” is a track trying for an experimental feel with vocoders and effects layered over sequences with fairly poor musical taste. Much the same goes for “Swan Song”, though here we do at least get some fairly melodic backing vocals that step outside the track’s general line, making the listen a bit more pleasant.
And luckily “Extinction” arrives, practically handing me a joke on a plate about how this record itself deserves to go extinct — but I won’t make it, since people already call me a hater. It’s another track built around a keyboard melody that sounds suspiciously like the theme from the TV series “S.W.A.T.”, better known among the older crowd by its Spanish title, “Los Hombres de Harrelson”.
Look, don’t waste your time. The day King Gizzard and The Wizard Lilard come to play live, I highly recommend you go see them, because they’re a quality band, with an impressive, intense, spectacular live show musically that’s worth every cent of the ticket price. But it’ll still be a box of chocolates.
Writer: David Sàez