“Fishing for Fishies”, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s latest album marks a boring and disappointing return

Fishing for Fishies (2019), King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s new album, contains enough good tracks to make it worth a listen, but is the band’s most boring album to date (no theatrics, drama, murders of the universe, infinite loops, etc.). Before the album was released, I feared an even worse flop, despite my respect for the incredible talent of the band, because I had watched the music video for the opening track “Fishing for Fishies” and thought it was one of the worst songs I had ever heard, especially from King Gizzard. The bizarre and childish music video further turned me off and set me up to have low expectations. Lyrics like “I feel so sorry for fishies… poor fishies should be free” did not help.

Luckily, after the initial anti-fishing song, “Boogieman Sam,” the second track, acts as an immediate relief. A killer blues hook begins the groove on the best song of the album. The titular character is a bad man. He “ate Mumma’s babies/ And shot the policeman” before going on down to the nightclub where he shocks the patrons and causes mayhem. The boogie beats laid down by King Gizzard, and aided by generous servings of sliding harmonica played by Ambrose Kenny Smith, are irresistible and very danceable.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_un9PYsE1_g” width=”1270″ height=”720″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqgNebPm50[/su_youtube]

“The Bird Song” is a dreamlike abstract ballad with persistent percussion and a recurring piano melody, backing abstract lyrics sung in soft tones like that heard in a lot of early psychedelic pop songs. Stu Mackenzie and company ask “To a bird what’s a plane? A shiny white elephant/ To a tree what’s house?/ Is that even relevant?… To a cloud what is a breeze?/ It’s a predetermined sneeze.” The questions do not seem important enough to center a whole song around them, and the melody is like a persistent nagging parent, coming back, without mercy, as “To a bird what’s a plane?” is asked 12 times in a row. The song should have been cut.

Adding to the theme of environmental issues, particularly in relation to the ocean, Gizzard tackles plastic pollution, and particularly the use of single use plastics used to wrap many foods on “Plastic Boogie.” While the message is commendable, and delivered with brash lyrics like “It’s gonna come and kill us/ Death will come from plastic/ Death will come from people,” there are too many conflicting noises in the middle of the song, and the lyrics come off as childish and simple.

More generally on the album, the lyrics fall short, appearing much shallower than on previous work. Lyrics on Fishing for Fishies are either embarrassingly simple and cliche with little room for interpretation, or very abstract with little substance. On “Real’s Not Real,” for instance, Mackenzie sings about the nonexistence of someone’s reality (maybe?), asking “can we all just get along?… Your farm is full of sacred cow/ And happy’s what you’ll never be.”

Another of the decent songs on the album meriting a listen is “The Thing,” which contains pulsating blues guitar riffs that ring throughout, giving the song high energy as King Gizzard sings “The cycle keeps repeating / I can’t escape the rip/ There’s no stopping what this is.” Although “this” is kept vague, based on the instrumentation and cynical tone of the album, it could likely be the destruction of humanity.

“Cyboogie” ends the album strongly, telling the tale of a depressed Cyborg (perhaps a reincarnated Han-Tyumi from Murder of the Universe). The Cyborg fishes apparently because of a fear of music, as electronic boogie sounds, replete with classic King Gizzard synth, rage all around him. He laments how humans put a hook in a fish’s cheek. The song ends with “Cyboogie” repeated over and over again, and a prediction of the death of the human species. In a press release for the album they said this track was an “addictive taste of what’s to come from the band.”

Fishing for Fishies seems to be an album where King Gizzard was looking to settle down and do something more relaxing, while still pushing into new musical genres and crafting it within the realm of their unique sound. While this album doesn’t stand up to much of their older material, the boogie tracks are fun, and mark King Gizzard’s ability to successfully push into new sonic mediums. Besides, any band that cranks out five excellent albums in one year should be cut a little slack.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beIDKFwXam0″ width=”1270″ height=”720″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqgNebPm50[/su_youtube]

Article by Jack Austin