King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - I'm In Your Mind Fuzz

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are the genuine article, offering up psych-rock in authentic technicolor. The Lizard Wizard pay homage to great underground antipodean sounds, morphing guitar sounds from surf to cow-punk, and post-punk, and also processing harmonica into a kind of warped blues/progressive-rock, sounding like the unlikely conception of Captain Beefheart and Gang of Four, with The Atlantics dropping in for a threesome. What’s more, they sound like they’re having fun, which is the kind of infection that spreads in this genre. 

They share traits with other excellent trippy jam units like Moon Duo, an understanding that the music cannot resort to stupid, fairy-floss convection at one end of the spectrum (Temples anyone? Bob, you were right), and undue deference to bygone eras on the other.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard understand the place of blues in rock music; they rock out, they harmonise, process voice, use distortion sparingly. They vary up their sound, utilise lots of different pedal affects; crumbly guitar fragments here, gnashing guitar there, harmonica and guitar freak-outs, surf-guitar, guttural screams, low drone, high camp and spacey jams.    

I’m in Your Mind Fuzz is written with recurring themes in mind, a cogent listening experience. I love that. An entirely different experience to listening to a disparate collections of songs. I wish there were more cohesive long players like I’m In Your Mind Fuzz.

There is room for another psych-rock album in your collection.