Album Review: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

Stu Mackenzie and the rest of the Gizzard boys have been on a tear their entire career. Since 2011, they have been releasing and touring like they are on a warpath. Their career has some absolute highlights like Flying Microtonal Banana and Infest the Rats Nest which focused on entirely different genres but still maintained a sound essential to the band. For a while thought it felt like they were missing their cornerstone album, their classic and definitive entry point. With the releases of KG, LW, and Butterfly 300 they lost some critic positivity and made some skeptical we would ever get that very cornerstone album. However, here in October 2022, it arrives. Ice Death is their greatest accomplishment and proves that the band still has the creative drive they always have.

Ice Death is a monster of an album, it's an hour and 4 minutes in length and does not have a song at a conventional length. However at the core of every single song here, is a catchy and amazingly written song. The effort that went into songwriting on this album is evident. Stu is delivering some of his most catchy vocal lines that work like earworms and keep me coming back to this album. While the band supporting him is full of ambition but always keeps it tight and worth it. My previous issue with some Giz albums is that it felt like the length of the jam was pointless and sometimes came to a mediocre conclusion without too much effort put in. My examples of that are some of the work off of LW and their really early music like Float Along. On Ice Death though every single jam is succint it has a point and it's point reaches a perfect crescendo every time. Take the closer Gliese 710 for example, the guitar work on the back half takes this jam they were building up and rips it into colorful shreds. This is the most clear and effective the band has ever sounded and it really provides and incredible listening experience.

In addition, they are back to using jazz as a major focus and more effectively than before too. The saxophone transitions on this album are often heavenly and played with so much talent. The band is obviously collaborating more than they ever have as Stu and Ambrose Kenny-Smith are evident but so are the drummer Michael Cavanaugh and guitarist Joey Walker. The band makes it sound so consistent because all of them are at their musical peaks. The opener Mycelium features this bouncy and groovy main section but falls into these incredible jazz passages by the end. I would also be remiss not to mention the Mushroom influence on this album. All of these songs are powered by psychedelic thoughts they had on mushroom trips, often detailing mushrooms themselves. It is very on the nose psychedelic but it really pays off.

The songs here are all massive in their own right and just unbelievable. I really want to highlight Ice V in specific though. The lead single for this album that I was skeptical in listening to at first however instantly grew on me. It was the first Giz jam that really made me want to have it on repeat all day. The evident climate change warnings the band has always made evident were so present in an abstract way here. The jam just evolves into this incredible piece but always reels itself back in for the catchy chorus. This was the first taste of how incredible this album was and I was hooked on it even before the rest of the singles followed. Magma is another absolute highlight focusing on these lower register jam moments featuring incredible vocal, bass, and guitar work. This songs structure always blows me away and Ambrose and Stu deliver so much vocal passion.

Every song on this album was based around the modal scales in music theory. Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Lydian and Locrian. Having a theory basis to anchor each song down helped the band sound so much more focused and allowed for the concepts on each song to blossom to their fullest extent. This is a focused band who made a masterpiece because they knew exactly what they wanted to do. This album is my favorite of the year for sure, it holds amazing musical ambition that you rarely hear.