King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Flight b741

1/30/2025 | Tags: music, review

Remember 2024? I don't really. But I did make a promise, to all many of you - a promise to tell you my ten coolest albums of the year. After putting it off for weeks, I'm ready to put off the other things I'm supposed to be doing by finally getting started with #10.

As a reminder, this isn't intended to objective in any real way. These are just going to be reviews of ten of my favorite albums of the year, ordered as best I can according to which ones I enjoyed the most. To read more on my ""methodology"", check out the introduction post where I discuss the upcoming list and offer some honorable mentions.

If you know me in any personal capacity, you have probably heard me talk about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard before. Honestly, as long as you're friends with any musician who plays guitar and has long hair, then you've likely at least heard the name, and it's not like you could forget a name like theirs. Pretty much every detail about them is unforgettable - the name, the ~25 albums in half as many years, the breadth of genres they've covered, the 6-man lineup that was once 7 back when they had two simultaneous drummers, frontman Stu Mackenzie's signature shouts and "woo!"s, their system for supporting bootlegs of their own concerts... They are a band of five million novelties and easter eggs, both in sound and form.

They have had many sonically strange moments over the years - genre picks that come out of left field, concept albums unconcerned with justifying themselves. Their previous album, 2023's retro-electronic The Silver Cord, was probably one of the most bold genre experiments the band has attempted, and resulted in the boys having to haul a massive modsynth table to all their recent tour dates. It was the kind of bold move where regardless of how well it landed for you - I didn't get much out of it - you can't help but respect them for the bravery and effort on display. These guys love getting comfortable outside their comfort zone, and even if I didn't particularly enjoy The Silver Cord, their commitment to the bit makes me excited to see where they follow that thread.

Flight b741 is, in comparison, far less left field of a direction for King Gizz; if it is at all strange, it's only in comparison to The Silver Cord immediately preceding it. Here, the boys take us on a flight to the good old American south, indulging in varieties of southern blues rock that would slot right in to your uncle's favorite Classic Golden Hits radio station. In this way, it sets itself apart from their 2019 blues excursions on Fishing for Fishies; whereas Fishies meandered through boogie-, jazz-, and even electronic-rock, b741 is often glammier, more stadium-worthy, though somehow also jammier, too. That's one of the things I really appreciate about King Gizz nowadays; while it would be unrealistic to only ever explore new frontiers, even when they revisit a particular concept or genre, the end result tends to neighbor or expand upon their first attempt rather than simply restate it. Comparing b741 to Fishies doesn't even really make sense beyond the superficial.

Just some good clean fun with the boys.

As is often the case with Da Gizzarrd, b741 is more than a genre album - it has a gimmick! The songwriting on it is supremely collaborative, each song having verses written and sung by at least three different band members. For all us spreadsheet freaks who care about things like novel Pokemon type combinations, we even get vocals from the two lizards we've never heard before: drummer Michael "Cavs" Cavanagh on "Le Risque," and bassist Lucas Harwood on the title track. Both play to their strenths well - Cavs's verse is short and punchy, delivered semi-spoken-word; and Lucas's voice has a deep, gravelly quality that rounds out his track perfectly.

Discussing this collaborative process as an experiment, I have a hard time evaluating its level of success. Individually, there are tracks that make the group effort feel natural, exciting in how they weave in and out of disparate yet inevitable sections. The two lead singles are great examples of this.

"Le Risque" is simple and fun, each of the four verses giving the tune exactly what it wanted at every turn. We open on a simple but effective groove, Joey Walker delivering a tone-setting verse: self-assured and carefree with a slight edge, in an action movie way. The energy pulls back a little bit for Cavs's moment in the spotlight, his tongue-in-cheek verse punctuated by tight group vocals. Beloved Ambrose Kenny-Smith drops a sledgehammer of a delivery ("HELLOOOOOOO EVIL KNEVEIL~!") to open his section, where the band is in full Maximum Fun Groove Zone, just rocking out and having a blast with the lads. Finally, Stu brings the energy back down so he can ride a slow rise out to end the song on a climax.

"Hog-Calling Contest," while still divided in sections like "Le Risque" and most of the track listing, communicates its collaborativity in a much more immediate way. The groove here is so thrilling and electric, utilizing the full power of a six-piece band, it not only sounds but feels like something out of the Vulf catalog. I can feel the low-res camera zoom on Lucas as he carves a Dartian bass lick, the slow pan to Cookie at the top of his verse, the cramped yet euphoric energy in a tiny room absolutely filled with men jamming for their life. This track is an absolute highlight.

The title track is another big success for b741's songwriting experiment; it's not as immediately grabbing as the action-packed lead singles, but the different sections and vocals coalesce into something really captivating. On much of the album, the three or four unique vocalists per song generally come across as different perspectives; always united by a common theme, but all seperate characters or takes interacting with it individually. They generally don't feel like they're engaging in conversation with one another. It's an interesting structure, dulled a little bit by repetition, that excels in communicating a general ~vibe~ as opposed to a linear narrative. "Flight b741" is an outlier in this regard; the sections and vocals fit together more naturally here than anywhere else, making it one of the only songs that has narrative momentum. It's a really special little package, very well constructed, that I grew to appreciate the more I listened to the album.

Great live clip of "Flight b741."

Other times, though, the disjointed nature of the songs harms their ability to form a coherent or memorable identity. The opening track, "Mirage City," suffers from this the most; the start-and-stopping is too jarring to maintain the flow of the song, and the riffs and melodies are too generic to carry it. I did have to pull up the album to remember what this song was called. The tail end of the track list gets foggy, too - "Sad Pilot," "Rats in the Sky," and even the 7-minute epic closer, "Daily Blues," all evade me in recalling anything more than their opening few seconds. These tracks are where the album is at its soupiest, and where describing it as classic-rock-radio-ready stops being a compliment. None of these tracks are painful or unbearable, merely forgettable, which is perhaps a more grave failure for a band as creative and identifiable as King Gizz.

The rest of the album sits in a comfortable middle-ground of being relatively low-impact but still quite enjoyable. These songs are all front-loaded, leaving my favorite meat in an awkward chunk in the middle of the record. Following the flat opening track, "Antarctica" is memorable mostly for its frosty key lead and bright vocals from multi-instrumentalist Cook Craig. The song evokes for me the sunniness of a bright, bitter winter afternoon.

The next two tracks are both comfortingly Gizzard in their employment of odd meters to build straight-ahead rock grooves. "Raw Feel" is an excellent Joey Walker joint; if I spend more time with the album, I bet this one will be my next late favorite after the title track. The group vocals on the chorus are so convincingly and effortlessly Classic Rock Coolness that you forget it's a 7/8 groove. The following "Field of Vision" walks the line for me between tedium and groove, but the Joey Walker verse and iconic final chorus from beloved Ambrose ("I'm bein' a silly ! I'm bein' a silly billy !") win me over.

In the grand scope of my King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard studio album tier list (which I do update quarterly, because I'm well-adjusted and normal), this album probably falls relatively low, but that has less to do with the severity of Flight b741's flaws and more to do with how much I just fucking love King Gizzard's discography. As a Gizz enjoyer, we're spoiled for choice, so being disappointed by a release isn't particularly disappoining. I wouldn't even say I was disappointed by this album - I put it in my top 10! - just that it didn't click with me as much as the average Gizz record does. It's still a well-constructed and largely successful album, one that only further cements the band's consistency in being Those Prolific Guys who just, keep doing it, and it's usually something dope. I'm putting it closer on my tier list to Butterfly 3000 and Changes than to Eyes Like the Sky, I can tell you that much.

Listen: Bandcamp