The Songs of the Year

Wet Leg created a breakout hit out of one chord. But there was nothing minimalist about King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's 18-minute psychedelic freakout with its cacophonous triple-guitar throwdown...

- Ellie Rogers

01 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard THE DRIPPING TAP

The Dripping Tap – the opening track and lead single from Omnium Gatherum, King Gizzard’s 20th studio album – is packed with interlocking riffs, hooks and harmonies, multiple dynamic peaks, troughs and crescendos, and more fiery fretwork than many artists can muster across an entire album. How can a band possibly cover so much ground in one song? Well, The Dripping Tap runs to a truly epic 18 minutes and 17 seconds. For those who like to listen to their music on large flat plastic discs, that’s the whole of side one of Omnium Gatherum.

As King Gizzard’s frontman Stu Mackenzie said: “We decided, this is like our classic sprawling ‘double album – our White Album – where anything goes.” And true enough, The Dripping Tap is in no way a conventionally structured song. The extended and largely instrumental psychedelic jam-fest begins blues territory, reminiscent of the band’s 12 Bar Bruise debut, before a gong-like chord strike around the one minute mark signals the first of many gear shifts. From there on out, motoring riffage ensues, leading to peak levels Gizz giddiness in the form of a cacophonous hammer-on and pull-off-stuffed triple guitar throwdown that sounds not unlike an arcade full of 80s space shooter games all having their buttons bashed to bits at once. Dazzling harmonies light up the halfway mark and resurface once more just after the hypnotic repetitions of the “Drip, drip from the tap don’t slip” refrain, and just before a frenzied finishing freakout.