King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are on ambitious trek to release 5 albums in one year. ‘Murder of the Universe’ is the second one so far. Their first, which I reviewed, was “Flying Microtonal Banana” and I found it to be a sensational record. Go check out the review. I also review their album “Nonagon Infinity” which was another great album.
This, their tenth album, is a concept album and the concept is so far out there, that I can’t eloquently explain it. I will have to let someone else’s words do the work for me. I do know the album is broken out into three separate chapters. The first two chapters are narrated by Leah Senior and she has an almost godlike personae. The final chapter is narrated by a Free Text to Speech at NaturalReaders.com. It sounds like the typed the story into the website and it did the narration. Very interesting.
Outside of that I can’t describe this album’s story. I will leave it to Wikipedia to do that for me…
The first (chapter), The Tale of the Altered Beast explores themes of temptation, and tells a tale of a human who stumbles upon a mystical human/beast hybrid, dubbed the Altered Beast. The story starts from the perspective of the human being pursued, who slowly takes interest in the idea of being altered – as it is considered taboo in their society. The perspective then changes to the Altered Beast’s itself, who is filled with murderous intent to kill. The human encountered by the beast slowly gives into temptation into becoming altered once the beast confronts them, as they crave power. Accepting of their fate, the beast and human merge, creating a newly altered beast, who now craves even more for flesh. However, the beast suffers greatly from absorbing another conscience – it loses track of its identity and eventually dies of insanity, decaying into the earth.
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