In an interview regarding his legendary 1965 acid tests, Ken Kesey recalled a suited businessman appearing at the event. A straight interloper in a crowd of bent youth, the man professed curiosity about the kaleidoscopic festivities scheduled for the evening. A few hours later, Kesey observed the same businessman adopting a regal demeanour, seemingly immersed in his own medieval court pantomime dream. What, Kesey pondered, had become of his anonymous visitor?
Kesey’s memory wandered through my head halfway through Trapdoor, the second single off King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s latest record, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. Like so many Gizzard songs, it’s deceptively simple: a frantic rhythm, an allegorical vocal refrain and a catchy melody. Bandleader Stu Mackenzie picks up the flute and skips into candy-coloured sequence: it’s as if James Galway, world renowned flautist, had dropped out of the stuffy world of classical music and turned on to Kesey’s merry band of social pranksters, opening his mind to a realm of psychedelic ideas. If only.
But what, then, of the rest of the album? Like its predecessors, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon is permeated by a thematic consistency. In this case, it’s a child-like bubble gum dream aesthetic where the world is stripped of its dangerous, violent and cannibalistic obsessions and reduced to the rainbow coloured beauty of its natural state. It starts in relaxed lounge mode – Sense is all paisley shirts, cocktail chic and self-imposed nocturnal lethargy.
From there it’s a trip back to the world of Saturday morning cartoons with Bone, the song William Hanna and Joseph Barbera always wanted. Dirt is the casual wander in your organic garden – if Michelle Bridges heard you playing this, she’d call you a freak, and you’d take it as a compliment. The title track is a sugar coated dream you don’t quite understand but you never want to leave; Cold Cadaver could be an exercise in perpetual amazement, if it weren’t for the surrealism of the song’s lyrics.
The Bitter Boogie channels Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky and locks into a slick groove that you never want to leave, while the frenetic garage happiness of N.G.R.I. (Bloodstain) might be Mackenzie’s autobiographical explanation of his bedroom recording obsession. The allegorical significance of Time = Fate is almost as impressive as its psychedelic pop cadences; its companion piece, Time = $$$ bounces on a pop trampoline and subliminally dismantles the rigid economic obsessions of the world around us. Finally, there’s some more lounge pop with Most of What I Like, a love song of sorts replete with enough hidden meaning to make Carl Jung’s head spin.
There are so many things to like about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and most of them are still to be found. King Gizzard’s world is one of infinite possibility and perpetual enjoyment, and given how shit the world seems to be going, that’s got to be a good thing.
