King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Flight b741 | Album Review
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p(doom) records
Ben Franklin once said, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and King Gizzard,” and I just think that’s beautiful.
Perpetually booked and busy, Aussie psych-rock royalty King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are back with their 26th record, Flight b741. After a run of über-conceptual albums revolving around everything from pure-synth analog experimentation (The Silver Cord) to death metal climate criticism (PetroDragonic Apocalypse), their first LP of 2024 sees the sextet kick back and try not to take things so seriously. Leaning into a ‘friends round the campfire’ approach, the songs on Flight b741 were merely loose ideas before the group went into the studio. In true Gizz fashion, the jams came naturally, with Stu Mackenzie saying, “The best takes were always the ones where we were winging it pretty significantly.” Once they got to the lyrics, all six members chimed in with their ideas, each riffing off what their bandmates contributed. To put the cherry on top of the whole ‘casual jam with friends’ vibe they created, the group decided that each member would sing the lines they wrote, creating a perpetual passing of the mic that exists across the whole record. Every single song on Flight b741 has all six members on vocals, a role previously only credited to Mackenzie (and occasionally a few others) on past releases.
Flight b741 is the musical equivalent of laughing with your friends, taking turns adding to the joke to make the group crack up even harder. Sometimes that laughter is literal (multiple lines in “Rats In The Sky” made me LOL IRL, but I’ll get to that later), and other times, it’s unexpectedly deep and introspective, or musically astounding. Every aspect of the album—from the various levels of crispiness on the vocals and guitars to the Gizz-ified renditions of nearly every subgenre of ‘70s rock to the persistent mentions of planes and flying and animals—is riffed and expanded upon to the point where you wonder if this is all actually intentional. You wonder if this album not having a concept is the concept. Or is it just impossible for King Gizz to come together and not end up with a narrative for any group of songs they create? In their “Making Of” mini-doc that dropped on YouTube a few weeks ago, we see the band working through song structure, huddling around vocal mics, and seemingly making it up as they went along. But we also see them all in matching jumpsuits, in a room painted sky blue with white sound absorber clouds scattered across the walls, singing about flying in the sky and exploring its expanses. Is the journey they’re continually singing about the journey of creating this album?
While we may never know the truth behind Flight b741’s genesis, it’s clear King Gizzard had a vision for the sound they were going for with this record: good old-fashioned rock and roll. The sextet tackles some of the most iconic niches of ‘70s rock, keeping the record varied and engaging from song to song. Album opener “Mirage City” kicks off with a screech of intensity before veering into a pared-back, twangy Allman Brothers Americana jam. “Antarctica,” the grooved-out surf rock song about a tundra, features one of the most unexpectedly deep-fried vocal moments in the Gizz discography (Stu’s euphoric, warbled “Put it on ice” belt that comes at the end of the track) that left my brain bouncing off the walls of my skull.
The group even takes surf rock one step further on the title track, “Flight b741,” using vibey, Jimmy Buffet-meets-Beach-Boys-meets-Beatles textures and an unconventional song structure to have their own personal “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” moment. There’s also the most unserious, Zappa-esque doo-wap blues on tracks like “Rats In the Sky” and “Le Risque,” with the latter being the most straightforwardly bluesy. Featuring drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh on vocals for the first time ever, “Le Risque” was the first single to kick off this new era for the band. The song’s airplane hangar-set music video shows the group in the same jumpsuits we see throughout their mini-doc, with Ambrose Kenny-Smith serving up his usual deranged realness and intense commitment to the bit, straight from the cockpit of a jet.
King Gizz thrash out on “Field Of Vision,” arguably the ‘hardest’ song on the album, with a similar pulsing intensity as Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” the biker rock track to end all biker rock tracks. The dueling guitars in the solo break have some of the crunchiest tones and most explosive harmonies, with Mackenzie and Joey Walker using every ounce of power their feeble solid state amps had in them. Amby’s harmonica adds that bit of hick flair you’d expect in any kind of biker rock, taking the intensity of the guitars to another level. I really am obsessed with the riffs on this one, especially at the breakdown right before the end; it’s even more moving slowed down, and flexes some ‘90s shoegaze tones. It’s one of my favorite parts of the album because it sneaks up on you emotionally, offering a chance to breathe before being propelled into the song’s wall-punch-inducing final stretch.
On the 8-minute closer “Daily Blues” (uncharacteristically the longest song on this album), there’s enough space for a back-and-forth between a racing 4x4 and its half-time counterpart. It’s not necessarily changing the meter, but changing the entire feel of the song between these two sections, basically all depending on what Cavs was doing behind the kit. “Daily Blues” is the Summer of Love track: using the chorus to talk about empathy in terms of who is or isn’t “getting fucked up daily” (by life) while also using the verses to say some pretty existential things about religion (“Faith only binds ideology” and “Is it fair to be born into belief?” specifically). This mix of fun and depth is a sneaky presence across the record, at times hiding behind the blown-out guitars, screeching harmonica, and gritty keys.
I expect to be blown away by at least one musical choice every time I listen to a new King Gizz song, and the songs across Flight b741 are no exception. There’s no doubt this album is fun to listen to in the good old-fashioned musical sense, but I wasn’t expecting the lyrics to take me out the way they have. I was only halfway through the opener before I realized I was missing out if I wasn’t reading the liner notes along with every song (something I recommend, nay, demand, everyone does with this album at least once). Every lyric is intricate, creative, and deliberate, bouncing off the next in perfect cohesion. It makes you forget that they were puzzle-pieced together by all six band members in real-time. From the play on idioms ‘casting pearls before swine,’ and ‘when pigs fly’ on “Hog Calling Contest” to the various POVs taken across the record (birds, pigs, a drunk pilot), what King Gizz lacked in preparation, they made up for in pure wit.
The lyrics throughout Flight b741 are either so deep and intense they have the potential to shift your entire worldview or so unserious you wonder if this was all one big joke to them. Between posing a question like “What would it mean to be a beam traveling like lightning?” on opener “Mirage City,” to coherently cramming in every word of “The splatter of the engine and the creaking of the skeleton, composing a requiem / I’m frightened” on a verse of “Flight b741,” you’d think Gizz were contemplating the meaning of life every time they picked up their instruments. But then, in the same song, you’ll hear a line like “How are we floating here? This makes no sense; I wanna go home.” The switch sometimes even happens in the same line, like “Corneal conditions got me scrutinizing / I’m feelin’ like a horse on Ket” on “Field of Vision.” Who would put two things like that in the same lyric? It’s so preposterous that it works.
One of the silliest songs on the record, which also happens to be my favorite, is the penultimate track, “Rats in the Sky.” Before listening to it, the title reminded me of how my dad calls every seagull he sees ‘rats with wings.’ In my head, I thought, “Ha ha, what if they wrote a song about seagulls?” but a few moments after pressing play, I thought, “Wait, did they write a song about seagulls?” and then a few seconds later I thought, “Did they write this song from the point of view of a seagull?” And yeah, after listening a few hundred times, I think they did. The tempo alone gives me that same pseudo-anxiety the seagulls in Finding Nemo gave me when I was four years old. Everything is staccato to the max, making it impossible not to bop your head and snap along. The whole song feels like going on a tangent and continually having to be reminded of what you were talking about, signaled by the hook in the chorus acting as the track’s anchor. It also just has some of the funniest lyrics I’ve ever heard:
“My crumb kingdom / And doesn’t Planet Earth look good from this perch?”
“Am I a pet, or is this man trying to kill me?”
“Eat, fly, survive”
“The garbage man knows we’re a symbiotic duo”
“Bread crusts are my banquet / Puddles are my wine,”
Like, THEIR MINDS!!! NO ONE IS BRAVE ENOUGH TO COMMIT TO A BIT LIKE THEY DO. And for those reasons, this is the best song on the album to me. End tangent.
On the whole, Flight b741 continues to back up my opinion that King Gizzard is one of the most impressive bands of the last 15 years. They’ve been able to chameleon between genres, techniques, and concepts while producing at a high quality AND quantity (again, this is their 26th album), all while simply enjoying the moment and going full-force into whatever’s inspiring them at any given time. Flight b741 cements the fact that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is more or less a well-oiled machine at this point, and there’s not much that could stop their creative juices from flowing in any direction they please. Not knowing which path they’ll take for album 27 is all part of the fun.
Cassidy is a music writer and cultural researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including but not limited to rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Medium.
