Made In Timeland
What do Gizzard and The Residents have in common? They both have Intermission albums! This is one of the band’s more skippable albums honestly. But if you’re going to have a gazillion albums why not have one like this? Two 15 minute tracks meant to play during intermissions at their shows. They segue together a bunch of mostly electronic-oriented goofy ideas of various quality while a clock ticks down, occasionally vocals and sound effects appear. It’s hard to even describe this album. It sounds like nothing else they’ve made.

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Omnium Gatherum
The band’s most diverse album, this is actually a double album for real this time and it earns the runtime with only the very end of the album losing steam. It blasts off right out of the gate with The Dripping Tap, one of the band’s most entertaining epics. It’s 18 minutes and largely repeats its ideas over and over, but this groove is so infectious, and every part of the song will get stuck in your head. It’s the kind of thing you could put on a loop to get you amped up for jogging or working out and never get sick of it. The song is an energizer bunny, it just goes and goes and goes. After that it’s followed up by several more of their best songs. Magenta Mountain, Evilest Man, Kepler 22b, great stuff. There’s a bunch more genre hopping, a couple metal songs here, some jazzy stuff there, and even two hip hop songs! Gizz doing hip hop sounds like Aussie beastie boys which is dorky fun, though I doubt anybody will be clamoring for them to do a hip-hop album anytime soon. The downside of this album is that the mastering is kinda shit because the boys thought it would be funny to just rip a vinyl test pressing through an aux cable and make that the digital version instead of getting it mastered properly.

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Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava
2022 was another 5-album year, except this time they went one further by cramming three of the album releases into one month (dubbed “gizztober”) and they all rule. I don’t think there’s another band out there who could claim to put out three of their best albums all within 30 days of one another.
This one is the most substantial of the bunch and got the most press. The premise is that they spent one week giving themselves one day each of improvising ideas in each of the 7 musical modes (ie: Dorian, Locrian, Ionian ect), then they edited the best parts together and wrote vocals overtop. Just about every track here is a mini-epic of sorts shifting through multiple phases. Several of these would become live staples, “Iron Lung” especially kicks ass live. “Ice V” is a total groove fest. I really like how “Magma” and “Lava” musically illustrate a volcanic eruption. “Hells Itch” draws a musical correlation of building tension and reaching a climax to illustrate the aggravation and relief of needing to scratch an itch which is a pretty fun lyrical concept. This is a pretty accessible and diverse record and one of the better places to start for anybody looking for an entry point into the band.

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Laminated Denim
Another intermission album, but this time fully realized as two 15 minute kraut-rock epics. Their Can/Neu influence has never been stronger with motorik beats driving polyrhythms tangled around the ticking of the countdown clock. Both tracks are terrific, full of continuous development and tension-building which the band has become masters of by this point. As usual the band is in their element when working in expanded form, and since there is nothing here but these two behemoths this is a record with zero weak spots. The first half (“The land before timeland”) is bright and danceable and one of my personal favourite gizzard tracks, the second half (“Hypertension”) gradually simmers as it builds intensity, and would become a live staple. The only way this album could be improved would be if it had a third song.

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Changes
It’s hard to choose but this might be my current favorite Gizzard studio album. I’m a sucker for music theory oddities and this album explores a pretty neat exercise in tonality. Originally intended to be released in 2017 the concept was too much of a puzzle to complete at the time and “Gumboot soup” was released instead. Most of the time this band achieves complexity through layering rhythmic elements while keeping the harmony fairly static, but this album flips that on its head as it contains nothing BUT key changes. The whole album is built around a challenge Stu set for himself to create music that’s in two keys at once, which they achieve by oscillating back and forth between D and F# with every chord change. With the key changing so frequently neither tonal center properly establishes itself and the album ends up defying traditional harmonic structure. The end result is a record where “wrong” notes and chords are common, but everything is framed as upbeat psychedelic pop full of rinky-dink organs and groovy toe-tappin’ tunes, so you might not even pick up at first what makes the record so unusual. The proggy title track is the centerpiece, packed with catchy moments, and then all the subsequent songs take a portion of one of the title track’s segments and expand it into its own distinct song that calls back to the various recurring melodies here and there. Such a unique concept. I’d love for them to make more albums like this one.

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PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation
We’re in prog metal territory now. Some of their most complex time signatures and instrumental interplay, all dialed up to 11. Really killer stuff. It’s a better metal album than Rats Nest, and a better prog metal album than what most actual prog metal bands put out (dream theater wish they could write songs this good). Cavs has leveled up his skill massively as the drumming on this thing is absolutely relentless. The riffs are thunderous. Their production sounds awesome too, really fitting the approach they were going for. It’s wild to think that barely 10 years before this they could barely play their instruments and now they’re nailing songs with insane rhythm shifts like “Dragon” on stage every night. This was many fans’ favourite Gizzard record when it came out, and while metal isn’t my personal fav genre it’s as good a pick as any.

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The Silver Chord
This one takes longer to explain than the others. This album has three separate gimmicks going on (four, if you count the lyrics which are about ancient gods or something), which makes this one of their most difficult albums to get your head around. For starters this is their “all synths” album, even the drummer picked up one of those 80s Simmons octagon kits to play. But it’s far from being synth-pop. Acid house is probably the closest actual techno genre this approaches. But the band is learning as they go here so this doesn’t sound too much like a typical techno record either.

The next gimmick is that there are two versions of this album. The short version plays like a medley blasting through all the songs in a seamless suite going by in under half an hour, and it’s over before you know it with barely a chance to process what just happened. the long version extends every song to between 10 and 20 minutes and revels in taking its sweet time to explore all the squelchy synth tones it can (the “short” version of the songs remain the same but then… it just keeps going and going and going). The extended versions are obviously where the real meat is but the songs often get lost in all the synthy noodling around. So the short version is way too short and the long version is way too long. There could have been a happy middle ground but that’s not the point. This is a record of extremes and I have no doubt that was intentional.

The third gimmick is that this is a companion record to Petrodragonic Apocalypse and each of those 7 songs have parallels in the music and lyrics contained on the corresponding 7 songs on this album. Sometimes it’s a straightforward lyrical or melodic quote, other times the elements are recontextualised in a new key or some other less obvious way. The riff from “Witchcraft” sounds totally different in a major key during “Chang’e” for instance. My favourite tracks are the 20-minute “Thea” which would take on drastically different forms live, going from electronic versions to folky acoustic versions to no-synths rock versions. The title track, which sounds like it has an alien on vocals, “Chang’e”, which has one of my favourite choruses, and “Extinction”.

The last thing I want to mention is that spurred on by the need to perform this record live they would begin performing sections of their shows on a continually evolving table full of awesome modular synthesizer equipment (nicknaked “Nathan”). Every show in the last year and a half or so has incorporated this synth table and it is extremely cool. they have gradually become adept at making their synth noodling sound more like legit techno than they were able to on the studio record. Live versions of this album would also swap the synth drums for acoustic drums, mix in bass, guitars, and other normal instruments too, which completely changes the character of the songs making them come to life in a far more dynamic way compared to the stiff studio mixes. They’ve also started to use the table to play non-synth songs in alternate techno arrangements which is pretty cool too. The synth table has not borne fruit on a studio album yet but apparently they’re working on it.

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Flight B741
I remember being initially a tad underwhelmed by this one when it came out due to the absence of their usual psychedelic weirdness and intensity (they still sneak in some odd times and things of course), but it’s grown to become one of my favourites. An album of posse cuts, the whole band is singing gang vocals together on almost every song with the leads being distributed among all 6 members. Lyrical themes center around airplanes and animals. It’s packed with catchy moments since many of the songs are structured linearly where each time a different member steps up to the mic they get a new tune to sing. The album title comes from the “rock chord progression” bVII-IV-I and you can bet it’s all over this record which gives it a really friendly accessible sound. Similar to Fishing For Fishies it’s got that rootsy southern rock feel but they more fully commit to it this time, and it results in one of the most upbeat cruisin’-down-the-highway-feeling-good records of their discography. “Antarctica”, “Raw Feel” “Daily Blues”, and the Beatlesy title track are a few favourites but it’s hard to pick out highlights here since the album is so even, every song is a great time. This record just rocks.

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Phantom Island
Of course it was inevitable they’d hire an orchestra at some point, every rock band has to do it sooner or later. Gizzard commits to it as much as they commit to any of their album concepts. The record is completely drenched in strings, horns, flute ect. This album is brand new so it’s too early for me to say how the songs will stick with me in the long run, but the songwriting comes from the same well as B741 with the same linear structures and multiple vocalists on each track. Some of it is upbeat, but the majority of the songs are slower, going more for more sweeping beauty and majestic moments. It’s maybe the most laid back and chill album they’ve done. The lyrics are about the band reflecting on their time on the road being away from their families and things like that, with some poignant moments throughout. I think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity to not try for something more epic with all the orchestrations at their disposal. But no reason they can’t try that on a potential sequel to this album at some point down the line.

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And that’s all 27 albums. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I’m not going into their live albums here but of course they have loads of those, if you want to hear their shows (and you should cus they’re a fantastic live band who often radically change the songs compared to their studio records), search “Bootleg Gizzard” on spotify or bandcamp or whatever service you use and you can find loads of goodies, youtube has plenty of HD vids of their recent tours too, and they stream most of their shows live for free (they just wrapped up a Europe tour and I tuned in for several of those shows). Or just go to their shows if they’re touring near you. They also have some demos and “early years” compilations which have some interesting alternate versions, non album tracks, and weird experiments.
As far as their solo projects go I’m fond of Cookie’s Pipe-Eye project who put out a pretty nice album called Pipe-Defy last year. The Mulocs led by Ambrose have some great psych-garage-rock/power-pop material. Cavs also has a drumming solo album which is pretty interesting as far as percussion albums go.
In the near future from the band I think it’s all but confirmed that another techno album is on the way, making use of the modular synthesis skills they’ve developed playing the synth table on tour. As for what I would personally like to see from the band, I’d like them to do more extended songs since they always excel when stretching out. Maybe actually do a one-song album for real. I love when they’re in krautrock mode and when they do interesting tonal experiments, so I’d hope for more albums like those in the future too.