King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Oddments [ATO]

Why you'll love it

Oddments gathers the songs that didn't fit elsewhere into a sunny, hook-heavy half hour. "Work This Time" is the band's most-streamed track on Spotify, and a 2018 vinyl repress sent the album to No. 13 on the ARIA chart.

About the album

Most bands keep their odds and ends in a drawer. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard put theirs out as an album, named it accordingly and made it one of the catchiest records in their enormous catalogue. Oddments came out on Flightless in March 2014, a few months after Float Along, Fill Your Lungs, with Stu Mackenzie and Joe Walker producing.

The making of it had its own drama. Mackenzie's laptop was stolen with the masters for several tracks on it, along with most of The Murlocs' debut, so both bands had to record the lost songs again. You'd never guess. "Alluda Majaka" opens with a sample from the 1995 Telugu film of the same name, "Vegemite" was the lead single (Mackenzie called it probably the most literal song he'd ever written), and "Work This Time" and "Sleepwalker" show the band's softer, poppier side. "Hot Wax" and "Homeless Man in Adidas" keep the fuzz pedals busy.

It's a short, friendly way into a band that has since put out several dozen albums. Losing a laptop full of songs would finish most of us; the Gizz just wrote the whole lot down again before lunch.

Also at Kops: more King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Flightless / ATO (cat# FLT-009R), a reissue of the 2014 album.