•
Rating:
As the year comes to a close and most people are busy with salmon canapés and questionable conga lines, King Gizzard keeps their promise and completes their project by releasing the fifth album of the year at the last moment. As announced by the band, in Gumboot Soup is all the material that, due to relevance or stylistic choice, did not find a place in the previous four works of 2017. However, don't think that they have put together an album of leftovers: the result can be seen as a summative soup of this year-long ride, which qualitatively may not add anything new to what has been said so far by Stu Mackenzie's band but which certainly confirms their period of grace. The album is by its very conception very heterogeneous and, even if it doesn't reach the compositional heights of Sketches of Brunswick East and Polygondwanaland or the hypnotic and dark atmospheres of Flying Microtonal Banana and Murder of The Universe, it still manages to be interesting for that game of references and self-quotes that capture the listener and keep their attention always high. A certain microtonal attitude, which permeates almost all eleven tracks, seems to have stuck to the Gizzard sound enriching it with nuances, confirming the fact that experimentation always enriches. If we exclude the two more psycho-pop tracks: Beginner’s Luck and Barefoot Desert, perhaps slightly out of context, the album continues drawing heavily from previous efforts by alternating fresh, syncopated tracks like Down The Sink with long psychedelic improvisations and harder moments like The Great Chain of Being. In short, not a musical peak but a nice summary of this prolific year that has definitively helped them break through in Europe, made their performances highly sought-after at major summer festivals, and sent the prices of their vinyl albums through the roof, which deserve a separate article for their beauty and the care with which they are made.
Tracklist
Loading comments slowly
